A better way to track citations - Research Blogs

"‘In the beginning was the link…’ – Most of us know what a citation is, a relationship between two publications.  But what is open citation data?  Unsurprisingly, its citation data that’s open, free to use, re-usable…and useful in ways you probably haven’t thought about yet.  Over the years citations have become the key currency of academic reputation, helping to measure the degree of influence any one scholar’s works have had on the academic community.  At the most basic level, there are two important aspects of citations associated with any one paper; who is cited in it and who it’s cited by.  The first is easy to establish, the information should be there in the document.  However a crystal ball is needed to know who is doing the citing. Those links are yet to take place and some form of citation data storage coupled with regular analysis to ferret them out will be required - something like the lifecycle below.  So, who’s doing this indexing and analysing and then supplying the information?  In the not too distant past there were only two sources,SciVerse Scopus and Web of Knowledge/Science.  Citation information and associated value added services could be provided to you if you were lucky enough to be associated with an institution that had an appropriate subscription.  Then not so long ago Google started providing citation information for free (through Google Scholar) followed more recently by Microsoft’s Academic Search.  Along with CiteSeer^x and theJisc Open Citations Corpus, these six players now make up the core providers of citation information.  So how has open citation data appeared on the scene and why are more publishers now making their citation information available?  Firstly, although publishers clearly see value in their citation data, it has now been recognised by many that the improvement in discoverability of publications outweighs the loss of subscriptions revenue (probably).  Secondly, the increase in open publication means that much of this information becomes open by default.  Herein lies the rub.  Where the data is available, it’s often only provided for tightly controlled use cases, or through a web interface that returns results rather than access to the underlying data—fine if your use case is supported, but not so good if you’re trying to achieve something a little different.  What’s more, if you should get hold of raw data from one or more sources, the chances are that it will be both out of date—access may have been provided to a downloadable snapshot from a database—or in a proprietary format that makes it difficult to use with information from other sources, (and many use cases for citation data exploitation require extensive—if not complete—coverage which implies multiple sources).   So could linked open data provide a way forward?  Potentially yes ... What we really need is some way of automatically interconnecting the citation data from numerous sources as regularly as possible and then exposing it.  Sounds familiar?  Indexing and aggregating services such as CrossRef are perfectly placed to provide such access.  So what’s holding us back?  ..."