CrossRef: Citation Linking Gets a Backbone

摘要

Virtually every academic, medical, scientific, and tech-nical achievement in the history of mankind has built on the work of others. Indeed, most scholars readily admit that the quest for knowledge is a collaborative enterprise and that they cannot advance their own professions without simultaneously advancing someone else's ideas. Happily, that quest for knowledge is far less tedious than it used to be. The advent of the Internet as a content repository certainly simplified the research process, enabling professional and casual researchers alike to do the kinds of materials cross-referencing that ultimately enhances both the breadth and depth of their own work. This brave new world of do-it-yourself access to content certainly has not gone unnoticed by librarians, who traditionally have served as the gateway to such information, nor by those who generate or purvey scholarly and professional content for a living. CrossRef, for example, notes on its Web site that online publishing has raised the bar for resource discovery: "More than ever, publishers, librarians, and information aggregators are expected to provide seamless integration of current and archived content across publishers. Scholars, researchers, students, and professionals insist on access to information that is relevant, timely, and easy to obtain."