Open Archive Citation Linking Report

It is increasingly common for article citations to directly quote the arXiv.org archive identifier (e.g. hep-th/9907123) along with, or even instead of, the normal bibliographic data. Over 80% of recent hep-th articles include at least one of these direct citations. A LaTeX style file (hyperref) allows authors to add hypertext links to these citations but it is very rarely used.

Using post-hoc hypertext techniques from the Open Journals Project [Carr & Hitchcock] we can add hypertext links from these direct citations. We can also derive arXiv.org archive identifiers from citations which do not include them directly, by looking up the bibliographic data in the arXiv.org journal-ref metadata, or in other bibliographic databases such as SPIRES.

Results

Figure 1: The references section of article hep-th/9907001 with a number of added links.

Figure 2: activating one of the links returns an SFX page which allows the user to choose where to look up the cited article.

Figure 3: choosing "Download from Universal Preprint Archive" yields the article's master page from arXiv.org.

The link colours reflect the success of the citation recogniser and the subsequent resolution against the arXiv.org bibliographic database. An orange link is one which was successfully derived from pure bibligraphic data; a red link indicates that the explicit arXiv.org number overrode the derivation process. A blue number indicates that the presence of a citation was correctly recognised, but that the reference is too old to feature in arXiv.org. A greeny-yellow link indicates a citation which is in the correct date range, but which failed to match an entry in the database. Finally, a brown link indicates that the recognition stage failed by seeing too little or too much data for a single citation.

The program was tested on 35 hep-th articles: the results are as follows.