As you might have seen from our blog post, we now have references available in Event Data! We’re excited about this development, as we know that the ability to see what works have cited an article, book, conference proceeding, etc is used in a variety of instances. However, we also know that it’s a first step and there is more work to do to backfill and improve API performance.
We’ve had a few questions and there are some caveats that come with the data. Here are a few of the main things to take into consideration.
- Only open references are included. This covers the vast majority of references, but be aware that some members deposit references with limited and closed visibility which are not included.
- We have not yet backfilled data and there were several attempts to launch. The first too place in September, however due to the issues we encountered these events are not contiguous with the rest of the data and don’t cover a well-defined period. We have been able to collect all new references since 25 October.
- The date used for ‘occurred date’ in the Event Data metadata record for references is the one on which the references were deposited by a Crossref member. This isn’t necessarily the same as the publication date of the citing article or the first date on which we received the metadata, as sometimes references are deposited or updated some time after publication. To access publication dates for articles, use our REST APIs
- The Scholix endpoint, containing data citations, is not fully functioning at the moment. To get data citations we need to look up the type of each work (e.g. dataset or journal article) and this is only about 50% successful for reasons we don’t fully understand. As mentioned in the blog post, we will solve this but the change is quite fundamental and we’ve taken the decision not to put a quick fix in place.
We have a public roadmap to track our projects. See this item for progress on the changes we’re making to Event Data.