New Search Tool Helps Find Articles
CrossRef announced
today a new
initiative that enables users to search the full text of
high-quality, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference
proceedings, and other resources covering the full spectrum
of scholarly research from nine leading publishers. CalledCrossRef
Search,this
new pilot program utilizes the collaborative environment
ofCrossRef,the reference-linking service for scholarly
publishing, and Google™search technologies.
“CrossRefis
very excited to work with Google on this pilot program. Researchers,
scientists and librarians should find CrossRef Search a valuable
search tool,” said Ed Pentz, executive director ofCrossRef. “Now,
researchers and students interested in mining published scholarship
have immediate access to targeted, interdisciplinary and
cross-publisher search on full text using the powerful and
familiar Google technology,” Mr. Pentz continued. “CrossRef
Search, likeCrossRefitself, breaks down barriers
between publishers on behalf of research and library communities.”
CrossRef Searchis
available to all users, free of charge, on the websites of
participating publishers, and encompasses current journal
issues as well as back files. The results are delivered from
the regular Google index but filter out everything except
the participating publishers’ content, and will link
to the content on publishers’ websites via DOIs (Digital
Object Identifiers) or regular URLs.CrossRefitself
doesn’t host any content or perform searches—CrossRef works
behind the scenes with Google to facilitate the crawling
of content on publishers’ sites and sets
the policies and guidelines governing publisher participation
in the initiative. As well as enablingCrossRef
Search,the partnership with Google also means that full-text content
from the publishers is also referenced by the main Google.com
index in its more general searches. Participating publishers,
with links to theCrossRef Searchpages,
are:
American Physical Society (http://prola.aps.org/xrs.html)
Annual Reviews (http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/search/external)
Association for Computing Machinery (http://portal.acm.org/xrs.cfm)
Blackwell Publishing (http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/servlet/useragent?func=showSearch&type=external)
Institute of Physics Publishing (http://www.iop.org/EJ/search)
International Union of Crystallography (http://journals.iucr.org/—click “search” and
scroll down the page)
Nature Publishing Group (http://www.nature.com/dynasearch/app/dynasearch.taf)
Oxford University Press (http://hmg.oupjournals.org/search.dtl—each
journal’s search page includes a link)
John Wiley & Sons,
Inc.
(http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/crossref.html)
The CrossRef Search pilot will run through 2004 to evaluate functionality and
to gather feedback from scientists, scholars and librarians
for the purpose of fine-tuning the program. Participating
publishers are also investigating how DOIs can be used to
improve indexing of content and enable persistent links from
search results to the full text of content at publishers’ sites. CrossRef is also in discussion with other search engines.
CrossRef is
an independent membership association (currently it has 300
members), founded and directed by publishers. Its general
mission is to facilitate access to published scholarship
through collaborative technologies. Specifically, CrossRef operates a cross-publisher citation linking system
that enables a researcher to click on a reference citation
in a journal on one publisher’s platform and link to
the cited article at another publisher’s platform.
In this way, CrossRef functions
as a sort of digital switchboard. It holds no full text content,
but rather effects linkages through DOIs (Digital Object
Identifiers), which are tagged to article metadata supplied
by the participating publishers. A DOI allows for persistent
linking, because once material has been given a DOI it never
changes, unlike a URL which becomes obsolete when it is moved.
The end result is an efficient, scalable linking system.#
More information about CrossRef is available
at http://www.crossref.org.
