Content area
Full text
Instruction Services Librarian Mississippi State University
The very nature of scholarly research has fundamentally changed with the increased availability of reference or citation linking. With the ubiquity of the Web, it seems natural to users and information professionals alike that they be able to link painlessly among full-text articles, abstracting and indexing (A&I) bibliographic information, and article reference lists. In a perfect world, such linking would occur seamlessly. However, in reality, technical obstacles, as well as organizational concerns, blur the vision of perfect, seamless reference linking. Information professionals need to be aware of the technical and organizational interests and obstacles associated with reference linking in order to better serve their users.
Caplan defines reference or citation linking as "the ability to go directly from a citation to the work cited, or to additional information about the cited work,"1 whether the source and accompanying destination are journal articles, Web sites, conference proceedings, entries in A&I databases, or even a link sent via e-mail from one colleague to another. Generally, in the scholarly community, reference linking is first and foremost thought of as a link among and between journal articles and bibliographic entries. In the electronic scholarly publishing community, linking initiatives have first attacked the obstacles and problems associated with linking among and between journal articles and bibliographic entries.
In the past, linking generally was built around the collections of a specific publisher (primary or secondary) or aggregator, whether internal or external. In other words, links either traveled among articles and records housed together or among articles and records housed on any number of servers, but the focus was the legitimate collection of a database provider. For example, publishers might provide internal links among their own electronic journals, or aggregators would provide internal links among full text provided by their services. In terms of reference linking, however, these sorts of closed systems are only partially successful. As Caplan reminds us, "It is very unlikely that any article published by Elsevier will cite only other articles in other Elsevier journals."2 It is also unlikely that any one full-text repository will in itself be large enough for any one body of literature. Necessarily, then, a hybrid model of both internal and external linking emerges. While more useful, inclusive,...