If you’ve ever thought that scholarly citation practice was antediluvian and perverse- you should check-out patents some day.

Over the past year of so Crossref has been working with Cambia and the The Lens to explore how we can better link scholarly literature to and from the patent literature. The first object of our collaboration was to attempt to link patents hosted on the new, beta version of The Lens to the Scholarly literature. To do this, Crossref and Cambia been enhancing Crossref’s citation matching mechanisms in order to better resolve the wide variety of eclectic and terse patent citation styles to Crossref DOIs.

PDF-EXTRACT

Crossref Labs is happy to announce the first public release of “pdf-extract” an open source set of tools and libraries for extracting citation references (and, eventually, other semantic metadata) from PDFs. We first demonstrated this tool to Crossref members at our annual meeting last year. See the pdf-extract labs page for a detailed introduction to this new set of tools.

If you are unable to download and install the tool, you can play with a experimental web interface called “Extracto.” Be warned, Extracto is running on very feeble server using an erratic and slow internet connection. The only guarantee that we can make about using it is that it will repeatedly fall over and annoy you. The weasel has spoken.

Today two new record types were added to dx.doi.org resolution for Crossref DOIs. These allow anyone to retrieve DOI bibliographic metadata as formatted bibliographic entries. To perform the formatting we’re using the citation style language processor, citeproc-js which supports a shed load of citation styles and locales.

In fact, all the styles and locales found in the CSL repositories, including many common styles such as bibtex, apa, ieee, harvard, vancouver and chicago are supported. First off, if you’d like to try citation formatting without using content negotiation, there’s a simple web UI that allows input of a DOI, style and locale selection. If you’re more into accessing the web via your favorite programming language, have a look at these content negotiation curl examples. To make a request for the new “text/bibliography” record type: $ curl -LH “Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex” http://dx.doi.org.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/10.1038/nrd842 @article{Atkins_Gershell_2002, title={From the analyst’s couch: Selective anticancer drugs}, volume={1}, DOI={10.1038/nrd842}, number={7}, journal={Nature Reviews Drug Discovery}, author={Atkins, Joshua H. and Gershell, Leland J.}, year={2002}, month={Jul}, pages={491-492}} A locale can be specified with the “locale” record type parameter, like this: $ curl -LH “Accept: text/bibliography; style=mla; locale=fr-FR” http://dx.doi.org.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/10.1038/nrd842 Atkins, Joshua H., et Leland J. Gershell. « From the analyst’s couch: Selective anticancer drugs ». Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 1.7 (2002): 491-492. You may want to process metadata through CSL yourself. For this use case, there’s another new record type, “application/citeproc+json” that returns metadata in a citeproc-friendly JSON form: $ curl -LH “Accept: application/citeproc+json” http://dx.doi.org.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/10.1038/nrd842 {“volume”:“1”,“issue”:“7”,“DOI”:“10.1038/nrd842”,“title”:“From the analyst’s couch: Selective anticancer drugs”,“container-title”:“Nature Reviews Drug Discovery”,“issued”:{“date-parts”:[[2002,7]]},“author”:[{“family”:“Atkins”,“given”:“Joshua H.”},{“family”:“Gershell”,“given”:“Leland J.”}],“page”:“491-492”,“type”:“article-journal”} Finally, to retrieve lists of supported styles and locales, see:

While working on an internal project, we developed “pdfstamp“, a command-line tool that allows one to easily apply linked images to PDFs. We thought some in our community might find it useful and have released it on github. Some more PDF-related tools will follow soon.