Links between the literature and the data will enhance the value of each. In some fields, journals are beginning to require authors to submit data sets to these data depositories. Increasingly, scholars are making their data available through databases such as GenBank, the Protein Data Bank, or the fMRI Data Center. Almost from the earliest days of the Web, publishers have worked toward an interlinked body of knowledge and have envisioned links to gene sequences, chemical structures, multimedia, and Web site data in addition to the journal literature.
#Library hunter citation tools full#
The link may be to additional metadata in a secondary source or to the full text of the cited reference from a library collection or a publisher’s Web site.Īctionable reference links are just the tip of an interconnected scholarly communication system. Not only do references cite relevant previous work, they also provide one of the most valuable functions in electronic publishing: an actionable, clickable link to more information about the citation. Reference citations in scholarly publishing have never been more important than in the age of electronic distribution. Despite continuing advances in reference-matching technology, for the most part reference-link quality reflects the expression “garbage in, garbage out.” This article looks at the importance of reference citations, the common problems, and the steps publishers are taking to solve them. Perhaps at one time publishers might have assumed that informed readers (or their graduate students) encountering faulty references might dig deeper to find the cited works, but today we entrust computers to make the links.
As a result, many references are inconsistent, incomplete, poorly structured, or just plain wrong. Most academic authors understandably pay more attention to their ideas than to their references. The problem is that reference quality and accuracy have been known weaknesses in scholarly publishing for many years. Reference citations in scholarly publishing are critical, providing measurability and discoverability.
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