Non-source items are a serious problem everywhere

Making bibliographic data available for researchers, scholars and others is important in all disciplines to ensure easy and fast access to the literature and other scientific resources such as research datasets. Our previous project EXCITE has addressed this problem and narrowed the gap between the availability of citation data in the social sciences. EXCITE has researched, developed, and deployed powerful tools (https://github.com/exciteproject/) that localize, extract and segment reference strings in PDF documents and then match them against bibliographic databases. One of the main conclusions derived from EXCITE is that the metadata of approx. 60% of the cited papers and other scientific resources are outside of available bibliographic databases. The extracted reference strings (items) that could not be matched are called “non-source items” (NSI). NSI include incomplete or erroneous references as well as references that indeed do not exist in the available bibliographic databases, especially references to datasets, websites and other material. This talk will highlight the significance of NSI for citation matching and suggest possible algorithms to reduce the amount of NSI in digital libraries.

Presentation given at the Workshop On Open Citations And Open Scholarly Metadata 2020 (Virtual Event)