More links to journal articles

Writing about web page http://www.crossref.org/freeTextQuery/

CrossRef have introduced a very neat tool that will look up the DOI of any journal article for you when you type in a reference in whatever format. It will give you the doi and a link built around the doi for a journal article. It will even look up several references at a time, if you have a list.

This has the potential to be a very useful and powerful tool. It is theoretically better than our Build-a-Link in so far as it will handle lists of references in any format whilst Build-a-Link only handles one reference at a time and requires you to enter each of the reference elements separately on a form.

However, it is not as good as Build-a-Link in that it can only work for journals provided by publishers who use Cross-Ref, and it does not have any information about our own collection of electronic journals. There is a danger of course that you will be building links using the Cross-Ref tool to journal articles which you won’t have access to through Warwick’s subscriptions.

Also, although it claims to recognise any format of reference, it did have trouble parsing some of the references that I cut and pasted in from a reading list.

I would be tempted to use it in conjunction with Build-a-Link if I had a reading list with lots of journal references that I wanted to build links to very quickly. Then any references which it couldn’t handle I would look up individually on Build-a-Link.

Jenny Delasalle : 08 Dec 2006 10:04 |  Tags: Crossref Deep Linking |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem