FAQ: What is "nano" about nanopublications, and how do they relate to micropublications?
type: Nanopublication
has assertion: assertion
has provenance: provenance
has publication info: pubinfo
created: 2026-07-16T11:40:38Z
creator: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-0234
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
has nanopub type: Question
introduces: What is "nano" about nanopublications, and how do they relate to micropublications?

sig
has algorithm: RSA
signed by: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-0234

What is "nano" about nanopublications, and how do they relate to micropublications?
type: Question
is part of: faq
has content: The "nano" refers both to granularity and to formal structure. A nanopublication is the smallest publishable unit of information — a single assertion bundled with its own provenance and metadata — and it is expressed entirely in RDF, with every part machine-readable and individually citable. Micropublications, introduced by Clark, Ciccarese, and Goble (2014), target a related goal — fine-grained, machine-readable scholarly communication — but with a more narrative, paper-like orientation, mixing natural-language text with semantic annotations within a single document.