Last week we released a project update to our reference and citation technology, CiteReader.  CiteReader allows readers to view the references within a paper submitted to SSRN and the citations from other papers in the SSRN eLibrary, making it possible for users to easily go backwards and forward in the literature.

Here is SSRN Chairman, Michael Jensen’s message about the CiteReader Project:

SSRN’s CITEREADER™ REFERENCE AND CITATION PROJECT

We have been working on extracting references from all SSRN papers for 5 years as part of the CiteReader™ project that SSRN has undertaken with our development firm, ITX Corp. We have created a system to extract references and footnotes from PDF files on SSRN and to have that extracted data proofread by human beings. While this project is not yet complete, we are now announcing the release of over 6.7 million references extracted from the reference sections of over 182,000 papers on the SSRN site as well as over 4.2 million citations that we have linked to SSRN papers.

• The references from each SSRN paper (where we have been able to extract them) can be found on the REFERENCES tab on the public abstract page for each paper.
• The citations we have matched to each SSRN paper are available on the CITATIONS tab on the public abstract page for the paper.
• These reference links provide an excellent way for any reader to go back in the literature in any area, and the citation links provide an excellent way to go forward in the literature.

Data on the Current State of SSRN’s CiteReader™ Project

• Papers with Resolved References: 182,645 out of the 270,109 full text papers on SSRN
• Total References Resolved: 6,689,847
• SSRN Papers with Resolved Citations: 180,339
• Total Citation Links between the Cited and the Citing Paper: 4,277,354
• Papers with Resolved Footnotes: 60,721 (we are giving footnote extraction priority to papers with no reference section)
• Total Extracted Footnotes: 6,899,585

NOTE: References in those papers on SSRN that do not have a Reference section have not been fully extracted as yet. We are working on this. These papers (primarily law papers) have their references in footnotes. This means that citations from law papers are currently dramatically undercounted in SSRN citation statistics.

SSRN is now extracting footnotes from all papers while giving processing priority to those papers with no reference section. We have extracted over 6.9 million footnotes from over 60,000 papers with no Reference sections thus far. These footnotes and the references we extract from them will also be appearing in tabs on SSRN’s abstract pages. SSRN is now perfecting the algorithms for extracting references from these footnotes. The undercounting of citations from and to law papers will be resolved over the next year as our algorithms are perfected and references from papers with no reference section are extracted from footnotes and linked to the papers being cited.

Sincerely,

Michael C. Jensen
Chairman
Social Science Research Network

A few months ago, Peter Shepherd, Project Director at Project COUNTER, asked me to contribute an article to Against The Grain (librarians, publishers and vendors) for their Special Issue on Metrics – The Importance of Being Measured.

I wrote about article level metrics at SSRN and how we view the changing world of information overabundance.  Here is the abstract:

Do you read everything in your field today? Do you even know what everything means any more? Readers of scholarly research are faced with an overabundance of information due to interdisciplinary subject areas, access to research at earlier and multiple stages, and simply more research from more scholars. My simple definition of innovation is the ability to create new things by being exposed to a broader and deeper set of existing things, but broader and deeper have their limits. There is no substitute for reading and truly comprehending a specific article, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to read everything. We need better tools to know what research we need to read. We need to know what we don’t know.

The issue has been published and you can download my article here.

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In 2008, SSRN released CiteReader and Reference Technology into their Beta labs. CiteReader captures references from the papers in the SSRN eLibrary. These references are then verified and linked to the cited papers in the eLibrary.

Currently, CiteReader and Reference Technology are accessible to all registered SSRN Users. Registration is free at SSRN’s User HeadQuarters. We hope to take this technology out of the Beta Lab and make it available to the entire public in 2010.

Since we introduced CiteReader and Reference technology into the Beta Lab last year, we have added over a million “Cited By” links to our already existing million links. To date, CiteReader has successfully:

If we captured and verified the references from a paper in the SSRN eLibrary, the Beta Lab Public abstract page will have a “References Tab” [References (#)] where # is the total number of references we have captured and verified on this paper. Click on the tab and the list of verified references for this paper will be listed.

CiteReader References and Citations Tabs

Similarly, if the paper has been cited by other papers in the SSRN eLibrary, there will be a second tab on the public abstract page – the “Citations Tab” [Citations (#)], where # is the total number of citations to this paper from other papers in the SSRN eLibrary.  Click on this tab, and the list of verified citations to this paper will be listed.

These two links allow SSRN users to easily examine the literature an author used to write a paper using the Reference Tab and to read new content that is citing the paper by using the Citations Tab. This quicker feedback on the use of scholarly content will definitely give scholars a trail to follow in their own research, and will perhaps even change the way we rate the use of new content in real time.