We wanted to welcome you to this introductory webinar, and thank you for your interest in being Crossref Ambassadors. We’re excited to move forward with this initiative which we hope will bring a lot of value to you and your communities.
What is reference linking?
Why do it?
Reference linking is an obligation for Crossref members. If you’re a member you should be linking your reference lists using DOIs (where there are DOIs available). You can see this example from PeerJ - if you hover over the link in the reference list, you can see that the link is being made by the DOI.
Publishers used to sign individual agreements between each other to agree to link to each other’s content. This wasn’t sustainable as publishing grew, so Crossref was formed to provide a central solution.
This solution makes it possible for readers to follow a DOI link from the reference list of a published work to the location of the full-text document on a member’s publishing platform, building a network infrastructure that enhances scholarly communications on the web, because DOI links don’t break over time.
Reference linking is accomplished by members and their production teams, with the assistance of authors and editors who add the links to each reference in their articles.
Apart from the options above, you can use third party tools or even work with a service provider, such as a typesetting service to add these links to your articles.
OJS is working to implement a reference-linking plug-in, and at Crossref, our new Metadata Manager tool will help link and deposit references.
Crossref has a search tool that can help you do this. Just copy and paste the references in and we’ll try to match them to their DOIs (keep in mind that some content doesn’t have DOIs so you don’t have to link that).
Another tool is Simple Text Query - you’ll need to register your email address with us to use this tool - it’s not geared towards a very large volume of requests.
Again, you can enter your reference list and then search *click to load image of returned references* and we will bring you back the references plus matching DOIs so that you can add them into your reference lists.
Alternatively you can query Crossref with XML (this is efficient as you can get back matched references in bulk, however it requires skill with xml). I’ve included a link to our help documentation if you want to explore this option, and it will also tell you how to query for this information using our API. If you get stuck, our support team can help too.
A good next step, once you are linking your references, is to look into participating in our Cited-by service.
Cited-by lets members show authors and readers what other Crossref content is citing their content. You ask Crossref for this information, and then we allow you to display it on your website in any format you like.
You can see some examples of Cited-by on the slide *try to pick a relevant example for the event*. By clicking on the list of Cited-by matches, you can then see items that have gone forward to reference the article you are reading, perhaps helping you to find more relevant research.
There are many online citation indexing services and databases but what is different about Cited-by is that it lets our members display the Cited-by links on their content on their own website in any way they wish. It also only counts the citations we can see in Crossref, so this may differ from other citation ‘scores’ as they are looking at a different set of data.
This benefits the readers of the content because they can get a sense of how often the content has been cited and can easily click the links to go to the citing content. How often something is cited can also be useful information for publishers, authors, research institutions and funders.
If you are interested in participating, we’ll walk you through the steps.
The first thing you need to do is to deposit references with Crossref for your articles.
Once you have done that, you are eligible to participate in Cited-by, and you can email member@crossref.org to ask for your account to be enabled for this service.
You can then query Crossref for a list of all DOIs citing your content, and display these results on your website however you choose.
Cited-by is optional but there is no fee for participating.
You can deposit references in your Crossref XML as shown in the example above. This is an nice example as the publisher has tagged the individual metadata elements. You can also just add the DOI if you have it, or put all the text in one chunk. We call that an unstructured citation. They can be easier to deposit with Crossref, but they are harder for us to match up.
If you’re not familiar with XML, you can use the Simple Text Query tool I showed you earlier to deposit your references too. To do this:
1 Enter your registered email address into the Registered email field
2 Enter your references into the Simple Text Query form and select Submit. Be sure the tick box for 'List all possible DOIs per reference' is not selected.
3 Select the Deposit button and complete the fields that appear:
• email: your email address (a submission log will be emailed to you after your reference deposit has been processed)
• Parent DOI: the DOI of the article (or chapter, report, etc.) for which you are submitting references
• username / password: your Crossref system account login
4 Select Deposit again.
If your details have been entered correctly you will see a "Success' message. This indicates that your deposit has been submitted to the system queue for processing. When the reference deposit has been processed you will receive submission log via email. You will also receive an email containing the XML deposit generated by the form.
Once your account has been enabled for Cited-by, you can then ask, or query Crossref for the articles that we can see that are citing your content. The simplest way to do this is to log into the admin system at doi.crossref.org and enter the DOI that you want to query. This will return a list of the other articles citing it.
For XML users, you can query by uploading XML files to our deposit system and we will return a list of the matched citations. Importantly, if you add the <fl_query alert = “true”>, we’ll let you know if, in future, we see a new match to your content. You can also do HTTP queries. There is more information available via the link on this slide.
You can then display the cited-by results on your website in any format you choose. You should query for new matches or add these when we notify you about these to keep the links up to date.
At the time of me putting together this presentation we could see over 775 million cited-by links.
*Number of cited by links and other stats: https://data.crossref.org/reports/statusReport.html*
At the time of me putting together this presentation we could see over 775 million cited-by links.
*Number of cited by links and other stats: https://data.crossref.org/reports/statusReport.html*
At the time of me putting together this presentation we could see over 775 million cited-by links.
*Number of cited by links and other stats: https://data.crossref.org/reports/statusReport.html*
Crossref is not just about DOIs! We are not defined by a particular service but by how we fit into the scholarly community as a whole.