Spotlight on: reference linking
Reference linking is becoming an increasingly hot topic in the electronic publishing industry. Adding functionality to your online content by activating links provides obvious benefits to customers, and represents a key differentiator in a competitive market. Many of our publisher customers are already investing in Ingenta's various reference linking systems; we were one of the pioneers of active reference linking back in 1997 and, since then, we have added dynamic references to over 40,000 journal issues. Here we showcase some of the improvements we've made to our display of citations with the launch of IngentaConnect:HTML lists of references and forward citations are available to all registered users from the article abstract page.
This provides potential users of your full text with the opportunity to view contextual metadata about the article and, in reverse, helps them to reach those of your articles which have been cited by other publishers' content on IngentaConnect. Users can choose whether to view the references in a new window, which complies with the latest accessibility guidelines, and also allows users to view the references in parallel with the full text in a separate window. The ensuing references list clearly identifies the source article, and highlights to the user both how many references have been extracted from the source article, and how many of these we have been able to match via one of our 6 reference linking partners.
Active references are also viewable from within the PDF full text
If your data is suitable, Ingenta's comprehensive content processing system can embed dynamic reference links that remain live even after the article has been downloaded. Metadata from your references is regularly queried against our reference linking partners' databases to ensure that links are kept up-to-date; both HTML lists and PDFs are rendered in realtime to ensure reference links are activated to the latest resources – at no extra charge.
Clicking on a matched reference renders a new window containing the onward links available for the cited article.
These are displayed in the most useful order to the user, with OpenURL links displayed first (where the current user's institution has a registered link server), full-text links second, and links to abstract and indexing databases third – don't forget that in many cases the A&I record may itself contain an onward link to full text. Most users following a link from Ingenta will be able to reach the full text of the cited article with just a few clicks (subject, of course, to their access rights at the target site).
Want to know more?
Contact your client manager for a walk-through of our reference linking services. If you're not yet an Ingenta customer, contact a member of our sales teams via:
North America :: ussales@ingenta.com or +1 401 331 2014
Rest of World :: uksales@ingenta.com or +44 1865 799000