An Approach Towards Establishing Reference Linking in Desktop Reference Manager

Abstract

The growth in the availability of number of research journal articles in a digital form is explosive. So more and more researchers have turned towards the publications in digital form, download and maintain them in their standalone personal computers. This increase in a number of publications in digital form has made it difficult for researchers, who have to face the burden of managing, linking and searching the research journal articles on their personal computers. Many reference manager softwares like RefWorks, Zotero, EndNote, and Mendeley are available in the market, which provide an easy way for a researcher to organize and manage the research journal articles. These above said reference managers take the help of extracted basic metadata such as Title, Author, Abstract, etc. to organize the journal articles and maintain a link between them. But the essential feature of “reference linking” is not focused. Reference linking is a feature where a cited article can be tracked from the article citing it, from a large volume of journal article collection. This feature is mostly available for online, but not for offline standalone personal computers. This paper addresses this problem in detail, explores the existing reference linking features which exist for online scholarlty literature, presents the algorithms for retrieving the metadata along with references at the end of each journal article and a way for storing and linking them to the full texts present in the reference management software that works on a standalone personal computer, using semantic technology. A reference management software “sodhanaRef” which includes the reference linking feature and semantic search has been built along with an explanation about its architecture.