If you have looked for articles in the library’s online databases, you have probably seen some green and white “Get It!” icons. If you have actually clicked one of those buttons you might be left with some questions about how they (may or may not) work. Those buttons are one part of the library’s “citation linking” service and in this article I will explain what that service is, what the “Get It!” buttons do, and how you can use the citation linker ways you might not have known about.
Background: Electronic Journals and Databases
The University of Alberta Library pays for access to MANY online resources. Some of these resources include full-text articles and others are just databases of article abstracts and citations. For example, if you search the database called “Library Literature & Information Science Full Text” for the term “OpenURL” you will see results similar to those in the screenshot below, with many of articles showing a link to “full text HTML” and/or “full text PDF”. Those links will give you the actual article.
However, if you search the LISA database (Library and Information Science Abstracts) and perform the same search you will not see any links labeled “full text” (see the screenshot below). The LISA database only includes citations and abstracts for articles. It does not include full-text articles. If you search LISA and find an article that looks interesting, the chances are the UofA does have access to the article, but you will need to look somewhere elsewhere for it.
The Citation Linker
That is where the “get it” buttons come into play. Clicking on a “get it!” button will give you a screen that shows you how you can get that article at the UofA (see the screenshot below). In many cases, you will be presented with a list of many different websites where you can find the article. In other cases, if the article is only available in print, you will be shown a link to the libraries catalogue where you could put a hold on the item or look up its call number. If the library does not have the item you want, you will see a link to the library’s inter-library loan or to the CISTI website (one of the UofA’s borrowing partners).
Those “Get It!” buttons activate the library’s “citation linker” service (also called a “link resolver”). The citation linker’s job is to take a citation in the form of an Internet address (a URL) and tell you how you can “get” the item referred to by the citation. Ideally, when you click “get it!” you’ll be presented with a link to the full-text article. However, that it is not always possible to link to the full-text article. The citation linker will present you with all the valid choices it knows to get you as close as possible to the article you are interested in.
How does the citation linker work?
The citation linker has three jobs:
- to read the citation data from the URL from the “get it!” button
- to know what resources the library has access to and determine which ones match the citation
- to create one or more links to the resources that contain the item referred to by the citation
In order to do these jobs, the citation linker maintains a large database of available resources referred to as “the knowledge base”. The knowledge base knows which journals are available from which vendors’ electronic resources. This data is complicated. Sometimes a journal is a available only from a single source. In other cases it might be available from many different sources. The larger full-text databases aggregate content from many sources and the contents of the databases change frequently. This means that it is very easy for the knowledge base to get out of date.
The citation linker also needs to know how to create links for each resource in the knowledge base. Each database uses a different system for linking to its articles. These also change, so even if the knowledge base knows which journals are in which database, it must know specifically how to create a link to specific articles.
The “Get It!” buttons don’t always get it right
With so much complexity, it is no wonder that those “Get It!” buttons do not always work. When you click a “get it” button, you are supposed to see something like the screenshot below: a list of databases that contain your article.
However, things do not always work out so well. The journal may only be available in print. In which the screen above would have provided a link to the library catalogue. If the journal is not available from the library at all, then there might be a link to the inter-library loan (ILL) system or to an external partner that has the item (”CISTI” is commonly listed by the UofA’s citation linker). These are not problems or errors: the citation linker is trying to give you the most direct way to obtain the article in the citation.
Similarly, if the citation linker does not know how to create a link that goes directly to a full-text article it may give you a link to:
- the homepage of a journal’s website
- the table of contents for a specific issue of a journal
- the search interface for a database that contains the article you are interested in
These things can happen for two reasons: the citation linker may have limited or incorrect information about how to link to a particular resource or because it is actually impossible to link to individual articles from a particular resource. Believe it or not but some database vendors make it impossible or extremely difficult to link to their data.
The important thing to note is that the citation linker will always try to give you the shortest path to the full-text article that it knows of.
Real problems
Real problems occur when the article is available online but the citation linker’s knowledge base has inaccurate information. This happens most frequently with large databases of full-text articles. These databases frequently change their contents: they add and remove journals. For example, maybe today the database Academic Premier contains the journal “Cognitive Science” but next week (due to various business issues on the vendor’s end of things) the journal is no longer included. Unless the citation linker’s knowledge base is updated quickly, it will contain to display links to Academic Premier whenever you click a “get it!” button for articles from Cognitive Science.
If you never notice that a link produced by “get it!” button is incorrect you can click on the “problem??” link next to it to report the problem and the library will quickly update the knowledge base. The knowledge base is update frequently from several sources, but sadly database vendors manage to make changes so fast that it is hard to keep up.
When the knowledge base is not up-to-date, several problems can occur. First, the citation linker might present you with a link to a database that does not contain the article/journal you are looking for. If more than one link was presented to you, another one might work correctly. Second, the link presented to you might take you back to the database where you found the “get it” button itself. These “loops” can be very frustrating and the library would very much like to see them reported via the “problems???” links provided on the citation linkers pages.
Finally, it is important to point out that even if the knowledge base is up-to-date, that the citation linker cannot work correctly if the “get it” button is malformed. The “get it” button itself is generated by the database website (NOT the library). The “get it” button is actually a link to the library’s citation linker service, which has encoded in it the citation for the article you are looking for. This system of encoding citations in links is called OpenURL.
There are several problems that can occur with these OpenURL links. First, the database might generate an invalid URL. For example, they may use a five digit number for the year of publication of an article (don’t laugh… I’ve seen that happen!). Another problem is that many companies are still using and old outdated OpenURL standard (OpenURL version 0.1 instead of the newer OpenURL version 1.0). In my experience the old OpenURL 0.1 links do not produce very good results with the citation linker.
Other Ways to Use the Citation Linker
The “get it” buttons seem rather unimpressive given the number of problems they exhibit. When they work, they are a real treat: two clicks and you have your full-text article. However, in the worst case you may end up spending more time than if you had started looking in the catalogue the old-fashioned way.
There is a MUCH BETTER way to use the citation linker. Do NOT rely on the “get it” buttons provided by the databases. Instead, you can use the citation linker directly on your own, ensuring the best results.
One way to this is to use use the Citation Linker page on the library’s website. The citation linker page allows you to enter in a complete or partial citation. When you fill in this form, it will generate a “get it” link for you (using OpenURL 1.0 format).
The next time you get a bad “get it” button from a database, I would encourage you to try typing in the citation manually in this form and compare the difference! The vendors are often the ones that don’t “get it!”
If you are looking for a paper for a ready for a course, there is no need to search the library catalogue or a database. Instead you can just go to the Citation Linker page and type in your citation. You’ll be a few clicks from the actual article.
Citation Managers and the Citation Linker
Another way to use the citation linker service is from a Citation Manager. The UofA Library offers a citation manager called “RefWorks.” It lets you save citations, and organize them, and print out bibliographies. Refworks will also generate “get it” links.
If you have a list of specific citations that you want to track down, you can save yourself some time by entering them directly into RefWorks, and then just use the “get it” links it generates to find the articles. You’ll have your bibliography and handy links to the articles in one place.
The last time I used RefWorks was over a year ago and at the time it was generated the old (OpenURL 0.1) “get it” links. I was disappointed. I’m not a fan of Refworks for other reasons.
The citation manager that I use is called Zotero. It is an add-on for the Firefox web browser. It’s a citation manger built right into your browser! Zotero generates the new (OpenURL 1.0) “get it” links. Like Refworks it can organize your citations. It can save the full-text of articles (in HTML or PDF) on your computer so that you can read it later without downloading it again.
Zotero has one other impressive feature (that kicks RefWorks butt all over the playground): it can detect a citation on a webpage and save it automatically. When I browse a database, or wikipedia, or google scholar, or many other websites, Zotero will automatically notice when a citation is available. It will let me click a button to save that citation automatically. I don’t have to type in the details.
Truth-be-told, Zotero doesn’t always parse out the citations the way I like… but it works most of the time and that save me a tonne of time. You would be *amazed* at how many website have little hidden citations in them (actually its various types of metadata that Zotero knows how to create a citation from).
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Peter Binkley from the UofA Library for suggesting better explanations of how the citation linker works and its potential successes and failures.