!
DOI Assignment and Reference Linking in Books
Scholarly and professional publishers are increasingly publishing book content online. CrossRef has a critical mass of more than 1.7 million book DOIs registered. This means that there are about 85,000 titles from more than 50 publishers available for reference linking.
CrossRef’s Book Working Group has examined current practices in reference processing and metadata deposit for book content, and has issued the following Best Practice recommendations which will
• Maximize reference linking among books, journals and conference proceedings • Enhance the discovery, visibility, and usage of book content
• Enhance the user’s experience through improved functionality
• Enable the creation of a book citation reporting mechanism which would give book content the visibility, credibility and metrics that journal content has
!
Best Practices For Depositing, Linking and CrossRef DOI Use
1. Deposit CrossRef DOIs at the title and chapter/entry level.
2. Add outbound links from references in books.
3. Deposit references from books with CrossRef to enable CrossRef Cited-by Linking.
4. Instruct authors to cite specific chapters and entries using page numbers, chapter/entry titles and CrossRef DOIs.
5. Update editorial guidelines:
Ask copyeditors to look for page numbers and chapter titles in book citations.
Use CrossRef tools to check references as part of the production process so that references can be corrected and missing information added.
!
How to Handle Updates and Versions
This section divides updates into two types: major versions and minor versions.
Major version changes will refer to updates that may affect the interpretation of a work. Major version changes imply that the publisher will formally notify readers that content has changed (through errata, corrigenda, or new editions).
Minor version changes are unlikely to affect a reader’s interpretation of the work, and the publisher will not generally draw attention to the changes.
Just as publishers now decide when a new print edition or version is warranted, it is the publishers’ responsibility to distinguish between major and minor versions in online content.
Given the above definitions the recommend best practice is
1. Assign new DOIs to new major versions or editions of books, chapters and entries. This practice will preserve the scholarly citation record. Older versions should remain available online with links to the latest version. In actual operation, a reader follows a link to the version cited and then has the option to link to the current version.
3. Where book content is hosted on multiple platforms (e.g. NetLibrary, ebrary) and publishers wish to enable linking to those platforms they should use CrossRef Multiple Resolution. This enables multiple URLs to be associated with one DOI.
!
Best Practices for Citation Matching
1. Book Title Queries
In order to enable citation matching at the title level, the minimum query needs to include the following elements: • book title
• book author • book year
In order to increase the accuracy of matching, publishers should use as many of the following elements as possible in the query:
• editor (where appropriate) • book title
• year • publisher • location/city
2. Book Chapters or Reference Entry Queries
In order to enable citation matching at the chapter or entry level, the minimum query needs to include the following elements:
• book title • book year • chapter author • first page
In order to increase the accuracy of matching, publishers should use as many of the following elements as possible in the query:
• editor (where appropriate) • book title
• year • publisher • location/city
• chapter author (where appropriate) • chapter title
!
Issues Identified for Further Exploration
1. CrossRef should organize a review of the main style guides to see if they already include recommendations on citing book chapters and reference work entries using DOIs. If not, then CrossRef should make recommendations and request that DOIs be included although this is only likely to happen when DOIs are used more widely for books. In the journals area DOIs are only now just being seen as suitable for inclusion in standard citation formats.
2. The Book Working Group recommends that CrossRef commit itself to using CrossRef Cited-by Linking for books. This will enable the industry to develop book citation metrics. The Book Working Group publishers should commit to depositing references for books and strongly encourage all publishers depositing book DOIs to do the same.
!
Technical Issues to Be Resolved
1. The CrossRef System book query needs to be updated to better handle book references by working with just book title, year and author. Books titles need to be reindexed in the system. A request has already gone in for this work to be done.
2. CrossRef will investigate adding publisher and location/city (which is found in many standard book citations) to the query.
3. CrossRef will investigate adding functionality to enable a book title DOI to be returned when a query is made for a specific chapter.
4. CrossRef will investigate creating a tool that helps publishers extract references from PDF book content and return tagged XML to the publishers.
!
General Issues Considered by Working Group
• Many publishers must manually clean up and enhance author supplied references in books. • Much book content is in PDF and references are not extracted and tagged.
• In book citations usually only the book title is cited and page numbers and chapter titles are not included. • Some book citations include page number in the “in text” citation but not in the full footnote citation, which is
what is used to query CrossRef.
• Many citations in some books are to journals so these can be linked effectively right now.
• The CrossRef System query works best with queries that include page numbers and chapter titles rather than just book title queries. Many book citations only have the book title and the authors/editors and year so matching will not currently work with these queries.
• The group discussed best practices for assigning DOIs to new versions of content; see “How to Handle Updates and Versions” above.
• No source for citation information for books and no means of developing citation metrics currently exist. CrossRef could provide this data for books once a critical mass of books has references deposited with CrossRef.
• Key items in book references are author or editor, year, book title, publisher, city. CrossRef can look at
incorporating publisher name in the query process. Most references to books are to the book title and not to a particular chapter.
!
Methodology
The working group broke the issues down into two categories:
• Content processing (i.e. production or authoring workflow pre-publication) where references in book content are identified, given some level of internal (but not necessarily external) consistency, tagged, and rendered within the publisher’s own DTD or XML schema.
• Technical issues related to the deposit, interoperability, or linking functionalities of reference information, and the role played by CrossRef in these issues.
Further, it was noted that the presentation of references/citations in books is distinct between
• The visual, or human-readable, printed format, which may display considerable variability from publisher to publisher, from one book to another, or even from one chapter to another in the same book.
• The underlying, or machine-readable, format that consists of the tagging metadata which allows links to be resolved and for outbound references to be ‘live’.
!
Book Citation Metrics
As mentioned, the Book Working Group discussed the possible creation of a book reference tracking report, examples of which are provided below.
1. ISI’s Web of Science allows authors to find out how many citations their individual articles have received. This could be the most useful feature of a book citation index.
2. ISI’s Journal Citation Report aggregates all the citations to articles from a particular journal over a particular timeframe, and creates an Impact Factor. Would such a metric make sense in the book world, where the majority of titles are one-off publications?
The last point is seen a major benefit by book publishers who would like to create a citation reporting mechanism for book content which would give book content the visibility, credibility and impact that journal content has. Such a facility would act as a significant incentive for potential book chapter contributors, editors, and other authors who currently prioritize publication in journals and serials because of the availability of measurable citation statistics in those content types.
!
Book Working Group
• Michael Forster, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Publishing, Chair • Darla Henderson, ACS, Senior Editor
• Joe Yurvati, ACS, Senior Scientist • Mike Bodinham, CABI
• Ruth Hadfield, Elsevier, Technology • Lauren Schultz, Elsevier, Publishing • Chris Shillum, Elsevier, Technology • Fiona MacDonald, Informa UK, Publishing • Mark Majurey, Informa UK
• Robert Morris, Informa UK, Technology • Mary Sweny, Informa UK
• Craig van Dyck, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Content/Technology • Sonke Adlung, OUP
• John Campbell, OUP • John Shaw, Sage
• Harry Blom, Springer, Publishing • Dirk Fernholz, Springer
• Wim van der Stelt, Springer, Technology • Garrett Kiely, University of Chicago Press • Eric Gamazon, University of Chicago Press • John Muenning, University of Chicago Press • CrossRef Staff: Ed Pentz, Geoff Bilder.
