CSL provides an easy-to-use but feature-rich XML language to describe bibliographic and citation formatting. It has been developed alongside CiteProc. Analogous to BibTeX .bst files or the binary equivalents in proprietary applications like Endnote, CSL is open, international-ready, and designed on a solid foundation that yields a language that is easy-to-use, while able to flexibly-but-reliably format bibliographies and citations for a wide variety of fields.
WebCite®, a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, is an on-demand archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL. Try it! Archive a URL here. It's free and takes only 30 seconds.
A WebCite®-enhanced reference is a reference which contains - in addition to the original live URL (which can and probably will disappear in the future, or its content may change) - a link to an archived copy of the material, exactly as the citing author saw it when he accessed the cited material.
Electronic Resources Reviews
Web of Science's "Citation Mapping" Tool
Brian D. Simboli
Science Librarian
Library and Technology Services
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
brs4@lehigh.edu
Copyright 2008, Brian D. Simboli. Used with permission.
In July 2008 Thomson Reuters added a new "citation mapping" tool to its Web of Science product. This tool, which is touted on the Web of Science (hereafter, WOS) search interface as a beta version, enables users to visualize the relationship between citing and cited references. The citation mapping tool is a welcome addition to WOS. Below I discuss how the tool works, offer some comments and suggestions about it, and conclude with some notes about future directions.
Persons interested in bibliographic visualization software may also find of interest HistCite, developed by Eugene Garfield, pioneer of cited/citing searching and analysis. For an overview of HistCite, see Herther (2007). This review will not compare the new citation mapping tool in WOS to the features of HistCite, but will reference the HistCite web page in a few places.
CiteProc is a comprehensive solution for bibliographic and citation formatting. It consists of an easy-to-use XML citation style language (CSL), and the XSLT code to format documents based on them. In essence, it is designed to serve as an XML-based analog to BibTeX, but with dramatic improvements in ease-of-use, metadata flexibility, and international support.
CiteProc reads the source document for citation references and collects the corresponding records from an external bibliographic data store, and then formats the bibliography and citations according to specifications in the CSL file.