Need help forming valid "citation" data in schema.org structure - seo

Question

I'm struggling to understand how to properly format the citation property for Articles on a website. The documentation only indicates it accepts Text or CreativeWork types, but how would I add multiple? Can I make it an array?
Right now I have something like this:
[{
"#context": "http:\/\/schema.org",
"#type": "Article",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"#type": "WebPage",
"#id": "https:\/\/bhamrick.com\/article-url\/"
},
"url": "https:\/\/bhamrick.com\/article-url\//",
"headline": "Article Title",
"description": "This is an excerpt from the article",
"image": {
"#type": "ImageObject",
"url": "https:\/\/cdn.bhamrick.com\/article-image.jpg",
"width": 1200,
"height": 628
},
"datePublished": "2019-12-10T18:10:23-08:00",
"dateModified": "2020-02-26T18:24:00+00:00",
"author": {
"#type": "Person",
"name": "Bryce Hamrick",
"url": "",
"description": "This is my bio.",
"sameAs": ["https:\/\/bhamrick.com\/", "https:\/\/twitter.com\/https:\/\/twitter.com\/bhamrick"]
},
"publisher": {
"#type": "Organization",
"#id": "https:\/\/bhamrick.com\/#organization",
"name": "Bryce Hamrick",
"logo": {
"#type": "ImageObject",
"#id": "https:\/\/bhamrick.com\/#logo",
"url": "https:\/\/cdn.bhamrick.com\/logo.png",
"width": 600,
"height": 60
},
"image": {
"#type": "ImageObject",
"#id": "https:\/\/bhamrick.com\/#logo",
"url": "https:\/\/cdn.bhamrick.com\/logo.png",
"width": 600,
"height": 60
}
},
"articleSection": "Article Category",
"keywords": "",
"wordCount": 5151,
"citation": []
}]
For the "citation" property, should I change it to look like this?
"citation: [
{
"#type": "CreativeWork",
"sameAs": "https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/01234567\/"
}, {
"#type": "CreativeWork",
"sameAs": "https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/567891011\/"
}
]
What other data is beneficial to include for crawlers like Google?

Answer 1

If you test your code (with the citation array) on the Structured Data Testing Tool - it will come through as valid. Making citation an array is acceptable there, so I'd say that's a fine way to handle it.
As far as what else you can add to each CreativeWork, that would depend on what each CreativeWork is. For that you can reference what is available at the schema.org specification for CreativeWork.
I'd note that while Google validates citation in your example, there's not much about it on Google Structured Data Documentation. Even if it's a good structured data practice, you may not gain much SEO benefit from this - but that's a better question to bring up on Webmasters Stack Exchange.

Answer 2

Just to chime in, I'm using the 'url' property, I think that's more accurate for this purpose, although both are probably valid.
My logic is: If you haven't defined something, how can it be the 'sameAs' something else?
"citation: [
{
"#type": "CreativeWork",
"url": "https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/01234567\/"
}, {
"#type": "CreativeWork",
"url": "https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/567891011\/"
}
]