Locating Cited References on the Web -- Stevan Harnad Stephen Clark 27 Sep 2002 12:46 UTC
-------- Original Message -------- Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 12:20:32 +0100 (BST) From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Locating Cited References on the Web On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, [identity removed] wrote: > Can Paracite eventually make Science Citation Index > redundant? Can it be a free 'citation index' as > eprints can replace subscription journals? No, Paracite http://paracite.eprints.org is a reference-finder. It can (and will) be used to enhance archived full-texts by automatically linking the references they cite, where possible, to their archived full-texts already on the Web. The idea is that it can be used either by the author, to automatically locate and link the linkable items in his reference list, or by an Eprints Archive, automatically helping to locate and link link references on submission, or by a harvesting service, returning enhanced full-texts, with tentative reference links -- that were absent from the original document -- automatically inserted. Rather than making the ISI Science Citation Index or Web of Science http://wos.mimas.ac.uk/ redundant, Paracite is a free tool that ISI too can use to enhance its own reference-matching capacity, both internally (as ISI has a certain proportion of internal reference matches, among the citing and cited items that it does index, that fail to be made because of garbled reference lists) and externally (as ISI too can enhance its indexed items with links to non-indexed cited papers that are available elsewhere on the Web (both free and toll-based). Besides, the services that are homologous (hence, also potential "competitors") to ISI's Science Citation Index are services like (1) Laurence, Giles & Bollacker's remarkable citeseer at NEC http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/researchindex.html which both finds, harvests and reference-links web-archived papers in computers science autonomously http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/aci.html and (2) Southampton's own Tim Brody's citebase http://citebase.eprints.org which harvests and reference-links the contents of OAI-compliant Archives -- so far effective only with the Physics Archive http://arxiv.org (because it is the only archive so far that has a complete enough set of papers to be usefully reference-linked internally) but soon to be enhanced by Paracite, which will add external reference links to texts (full-texts or abstracts) found elsewhere on the Web (free or toll-based), just as it can enhance linkage for ISI. Will competing free services like citeseer and citebase ever supersede ISI's Science Citation Index? It cannot be denied that there is such a possibility, but it is conditional on something else that the research community would need to do first -- something very easy to do, but still undone as years of doability slip away -- namely, researchers would first need to make a critical mass of their full-text research output openly accessible online by self-archiving it. Only then could tools like paracite, citebase and citeseer be used to reference-link the full-texts. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ (An intermediate step, but one that would be no more effortless than self-archiving the full-texts in OAI compliant Archives, would be to self-archive the abstracts and reference lists only! But navigating those textless teasers only might be, for its would-be users, a bit like (G.B. Shaw's?) hell, where one's desired reproductive partners are present in the flesh, but lack the requisite concavities or convexities -- to put Shaw's (?) metaphor in a suitably PC way for contemporary consumption.) So secondary publishers like ISI can probably rest at least as secure as primary journal publishers in the fact that the world research community has so far proved glacially sluggish in moving toward the optimal and the inevitable, despite all the potential benefits... Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html or http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the SPARC position paper on institutional repositories: http://www.unites.uqam.ca/src/sante.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the free OAI institutional archiving software site: http://www.eprints.org/