Hello @navotera,
thank you for mentioning the Dialnet crawler in the discussion. I intend to keep the <p> tag for every citation. But it is good to know there are services crawling the journal that require certain structure. The document does not specify text styling tags to be an issue.
My problem is that I need to put italic only on a fraction of the citation so it is more human readable. Also so the citation is actually styled in a way we require it from the authors when they submit. Like this
Demo, G., Neiva, E. R., Nunes, I., and Rozzett, K. (2012) ‘Human Resources Management Policies and Practices Scale (HRMPPS): Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis’. <em>Brazillian Administration Review</em>, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 395-420.
I cannot do this simply by applying css since the italic part changes for different source types (article, web page, thesis, book, book with anonymous authors, …). Therefore I need either the author to create the citation with proper formatting or code a citation parser that would reverse engineer raw citation and put the <em> tag where it belongs. I decided to use the first option since authors are required to style citations in the actual text of the submission anyway.