Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, June 23, 2005

Harvesting journal citations to books

Dazhi (David) Jiao won this year's OCLC Research Software Contest with a program called CAT OAI that harvests book citations from articles in OAI-compliant repositories and lists them when a user clicks on a book from a searchable OPAC. By default it shows only the top-ranked five citations, when rank is a function of the similarity of the OAI record to the OPAC record, but the full list of citations is just a click away. The software can apparently make use of any OPAC and any OAI-compliant repositories, though the demo uses only a subset of the OCLC WorldCat and arXiv. It can apparently track citations to any resources appearing in an OPAC, including journals, but my sample searches on the demo returned only books and conference proceedings. For more details, see the OCLC press release, the demo version of CAT OAI, or the software "about" page. CAT OAI is open-source but the code is not yet online.