This documents relates to CitEc. CitEc's current system for automatic identification of references and citations has at least two limitations:

These limitations are the cause of frecuent complains from authors. A typical complaint is "Why is this citation to one of my papers have not been included in IDEAS/EconPapers?" The answer can be: because the citing paper has not been processed due to the problems described earlier or because the parsing of the references failed.

At the technical level we are limited by external applications and little can be done to improve the process. For such reason, a way forward would be to develop procedures to allow input from registered authors.

In this document we present a proposal to extend the RePEc Author Service in order to allow input of references and citations from documents which have not been automatically processed. Such contribution from authors has two issues to be resolved: input and validation of data in order to prevent fraud.

Typically, we have to deal with two people. The "requester" is the author of a cited paper. Requesters want us to know that their papers have been cited. However, they can't credibly demonstrate to use. Only the second person, the "author" of the citing paper, can do it. In the following, we assume that requester and author are two different people.

The input process is describer later. For the validation of data we will rely on the collaboration of registered authors in RAS. We will develop a communication system between requesters, authors, and CitEc management, using email or web forms. The aim is that each input action from an requested should be validated for the corresponding author before the citation is included in CitEc. That is, the request to add a citation to a paper should be validated by one of the authors of the citing paper.

The input data could be managed as folllows:

From each document available in RePEc, services could add a "Add citation to this paper" link. This link will call a cgi
bin script located at the RAS server.
RAS will ask the identification of the user.
If not successful go back to the referer page. Exit.
Show the user a form asking her to add the handle of the citing paper. Documentation about how to find a paper handle should be added.
If no author of the citing paper is registered in RAS, inform the requester about the issue, and suggest that the requester asks the author to register with RAS and/or upload the citing paper with MPRA. Exit.
If the citing paper has no references in CitEc.
- show a form to the requester to add the references in ASCII format. A cachta will prevent robot usage.
- Put the input data in a queue wating for the validation.
- Send a confirmation request to the authors of the citing paper asking them to validate the data.
If the citing paper has references
- show the references list and ask the authors to identify the citing reference. unclear
- If succesfull unclear put the input data in the waiting queue and send confirmation request, else, show a form to add the citing reference in text format and send confirmation request.
- Inform the requester that her request is waiting confirmation by the authors.
A new option to manage requests should be added to the profile of all registered authors. Using this manager each author should have information about pending request, with the posibility to confirm or refuse them. Also a list of submited request with the date and result of them.

A proposal to add to CitEc

by Jose Manunel Barrueco Cruz and Thomas Krichel

Background

Proposal