=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3066/spaper4
|storemode=property
|title=Reverse Bibliography (short paper)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3066/spaper4.pdf
|volume=Vol-3066
|authors=Mikhail Gorbunov-Posadov
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ssi/Gorbunov-Posadov21
}}
==Reverse Bibliography (short paper)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3066/spaper4.pdf
Reverse Bibliography
Mikhail M. Gorbunov-Posadov
Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, Miusskaya sq., 4 Moscow, 125047, Russia
Abstract
A reverse bibliography, i.e. a list of referring publications – is a dynamically compiled list of
works published after the publication in question and contained a reference to it. Leading
publishers of scientific journals, as a rule, post lists of referring publications on the web pages
of their articles. In Russia, the placement of lists of citing publications has not yet become the
norm, but it is gradually becoming widespread. The reverse bibliography is extremely
interesting to the reader since it allows you to find out in which direction the research presented
in the original edition is developing. A traditional bibliography, i.e. an ordinary bibliographic
list of references, can successfully exist both in a printed publication and online. In contrast,
the list of referring publications is essentially an exclusively online, dynamic structure formed
“on the fly” on the screen of an online reader. The list of referring publications always brings
the reader a fresh current state of accumulated bibliographic data. Publications appearing on
the Internet and indexed in bibliographic databases containing a link to the scientific work in
question in their bibliography are reflected here almost immediately. The implementation of
the list of referring publications in a number of characteristic projects is considered. The
terminology used is discussed.
Keywords 1
List of referring publications, citing publications, prospective bibliography
1. Introduction
A traditional attribute of any scientific publication is a bibliography demonstrating which works this
edition is based on. Thus, the bibliography carries an obvious ethical burden. The bibliography is
interesting not only to the historian of science but also, of course, to the ordinary reader, allowing him
to delve into the study of the subject, find out important circumstances, detailed information about for
one reason or another was not included directly in the text of this publication.
However, the list of referencing publications is of much greater interest to the reader, i.e., a list of
works that followed this publication and contain a reference to it. The referencing publications allow
you to determine in which direction the research presented in the source publication is developing. In
other words, if an ordinary (retrospective) bibliographic list looks, as it were, back into the past, then a
prospective list, i.e., the list of referencing publications, looks forward to the future, covering the latest
work in the field of science under consideration.
The mechanisms for forming the usual bibliographic list and the list of referencing publications are
different, although they are closely related. An ordinary, traditional bibliographic list is compiled by
the author, and he does it now in almost the same way as they did before him hundreds of years ago.
Conversely, publication referencing lists generate bibliographic databases using modern information
technology.
The publication of a scientific work currently implies the posting of information about it in open
access on the Internet, as well as the transfer of meta-attributes of the work to bibliographic databases.
In this case, it is essential that there is a bibliographic list of the work among the posted and transferred
SSI-2021: Scientific Services & Internet, September 20–23, 2021, Moscow (online)
EMAIL: gorbunov@keldysh.ru (M.M. Gorbunov-Posadov)
ORCID: 0000-0002-7044-8287 (M.M. Gorbunov-Posadov)
© 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
data. The bibliographic records that make up the list fall into databases maintained by Google Scholar
and into bibliographic databases. Based on such databases, not only are numerous bibliometric
estimates of interest primarily of interest to bureaucrats from science are calculated, but also lists of
referencing publications are generated, which are extremely useful for the general reader.
If the bibliography, i.e., a usual bibliographic list, can successfully exist both in print and online, the
list of referencing publications is essentially an exclusively online structure, dynamic, formed on the
fly on the screen of an online reader. The list of referencing publications always brings the reader a
fresh current state of the accumulating bibliographic data. It almost immediately reflects publications
appearing on the Internet and indexed in bibliographic databases, containing a link to the scientific work
in question in their bibliography.
The terminology in this area has not yet been established. Along with the term “list of referencing
publications”, there are also “reverse bibliography” and “list of citing publications”. However, both of
these phrases have certain weaknesses. The “reverse” list is obviously aptly contrasted with the “direct”
one – the usual bibliography but in the word “reverse”, in this case sometimes one can hear the directly
opposite connotation: “turned back, into the past”. A “citing publication” can be perceived too literally
– as a publication that includes quotations from a specified source, while such explicit mechanical
copying of parts of the text is relatively rare in scientific works. Nevertheless, the terms “cited-by” and
“citing” are often used to designate the list of interest to us.
The traditional bibliography and referenced publications are more precisely and clearly contrasted
when using the corresponding terms “retrospective” and “prospective” (bibliographic list).
Unfortunately, in the Russian-language scientific vocabulary, the word “prospective”, that is, directed
to the future, referring to moving forward, is rarely found, and in the context of bibliography, it is simply
not used yet.
There is no doubt that the online reader is interested in the apparatus of lists of referencing
publications. Most of the leading publishers of scientific journals already post lists of published articles
to their web pages in one form or another. In Russia, reverse bibliographies are still rare. In this paper,
we consider well-known lists of referencing publications in some large projects and the implementation
of such lists in the online version of the Keldysh Institute Preprints.
2. Google Scholar
The most widely known and popular implementation of the list of referencing publications offered
by Google Scholar. Google Scholar robots systematically surf the Internet in search of scientific papers.
Each found scientific publication is analyzed in detail; in particular, the bibliographic list is isolated
and analyzed in it. The parsed bibliographic records are saved in Google Scholar, and then the database
built from them is used, in particular, to build lists of referencing publications.
To get a list of referencing publications, in the Google Scholar search field, you must either specify
the address (URL) of the publication of interest to us, or write in this field the authors and the title of
the publication. In both cases, Google Scholar produces a result similar to that shown in Figure 1.
Now, to see the list of publications referring to the given one, you need to click on the “Cited by 4”
field located in the penultimate line. The first two records of the result of this call are shown in Figure
2.
The reader usually wants to see the reverse bibliography when working with an online publication.
Therefore, developers of the modern online publishing environment are striving to reduce the number
of manipulations required in that environment to retrieve a list of referencing publications. The most
natural and convenient solution, in this case, is the placement of a previously formed hyperlink to the
generated list directly in the publication card. Fortunately, Google Scholar allows you to generate such
a hyperlink statically. Among Russian online repositories of scientific publications, this useful
opportunity was used, in particular, by the MathNet.ru portal, the eLibrary.ru library, and Keldysh
Institute Preprints (Figure 3).
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Figure 1: Search result in scholar.google.com for the text “Gorbunov-Posadov M.M. Scientific
Publication in Russia: Why and How?”
Figure 2: Search result in scholar.google.com for the text “Gorbunov-Posadov M.M. Scientific
Publication in Russia: Why and How?”
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Figure 3: A hyperlink leading to the formation of a list of referencing publications on the Keldysh
Institute Preprints website
3. eLibrary.ru
In addition to the above-mentioned hyperlink to the reverse bibliography generated by Google
Scholar, posted on the publication page, the scientific electronic library eLibrary also forms its own
reverse bibliography based on the data stored in this library. The Russian scientist is especially
interested in this reverse bibliography since the eLibrary funds contain the richest collection of
information about Russian scientific publications. It is not difficult to see the eLibrary-generated reverse
bibliography (Figure 4): first, you need to use the search to get to the page of the publication of interest
generated by the eLibrary, and then click on the link “List of articles in the eLibrary citing this” link
located on the right of this page.
Figure 4: List of referencing publications in elibrary.ru
At the same time, as already mentioned, the desire to see the reverse bibliography usually arises
from the online reader at the moment of reading the online publication. If, at this moment, the reverse
bibliography is “at hand,” i.e., the hyperlink to the list of referencing publications is placed directly on
the publication's web page, then the reader may well become interested in this hyperlink and follow it.
If to access the list, it is required to perform very laborious manipulations – to log in to the bibliographic
system, find the publication of interest in it, etc. – then, in this case, only a rare reader will be ready to
spend their time and energy here.
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Here eLibrary is hopelessly losing out to Google Scholar. While it is easy to place a direct hyperlink
to the Google Scholar-generated reverse bibliography on the publication's web page, building a similar
link for the eLibrary-generated reverse bibliography fails. The point is that the reverse bibliography in
eLibrary does not have a constant (static) address (URL). The hopes of online libraries of scientific
publications were at one time associated with a recently built API for accessing individual data stored
in the eLibrary, but, unfortunately, access to the list of referencing publications was not included in this
API.
4. Scopus
Unlike eLibrary, the largest international bibliographic databases still, as a rule, one way or another
provide an opportunity to place a reverse bibliography or a hyperlink to it directly on the publication's
web page. In Figure 5 presents a list of referencing publications for article [1] from the journal
"Information Processing & Management", compiled on the basis of data from the Scopus bibliographic
database and posted on the web page of this article.
Figure 5: List of referencing publications in elibrary.ru
In Figure 5, the third position appears somewhat unexpectedly: it mentions an article taken not from
the principal Scopus repository but from the arXiv.org preprint server. The fact is that in 2021, when
compiling a list of referencing publications, Scopus began [2] to include, along with its basic data,
articles posted on the popular preprint servers arXiv, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv, and medRxiv. Scopus rightly
notes that the most recent publications, which are now available primarily on these servers, are
particularly interesting to the reader.
Increased interest in preprint servers has arisen in connection with the massive placement of
publications there on the Covid-19 pandemic. For such publications, the key role was played by the
speed of their appearance in the public online, and here, as you know, preprints simply have no equal.
During the pandemic, about half of all publications devoted to the coronavirus were published in the
form of a preprint.
5. Crossref
Crossref's reverse bibliography based on publication data receiving DOIs is among the most popular
and authoritative. In particular, Springer publishes prospective bibliographic lists on the web pages of
its publications (Figure 6).
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Figure 6: List of Crossref referencing publications on Springer website
On the Crossref website, the list of referencing publications can only be obtained by calling the API,
i.e. here you need to write the program code. This code is implemented, in particular, on the Keldysh
Institute Preprints website. The result is shown in Figure 7.
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Figure 7: List of Crossref referencing publications on the Keldysh Institute Preprints website
However, an ordinary reader who has the DOI of the publication that interested him can get the
corresponding reverse bibliography without programming. To do this, he will have to refer to third-
party sites, for example, to [3]. There, to get a list of referring publications, it is enough to enter the
existing DOI value in the corresponding search field.
6. Other dynamic bibliographic lists
Along with the reverse bibliography discussed above, there are other dynamically compiled
bibliographic lists used in bibliographic systems. The most popular of them are lists of “consonant”,
“related” publications, which collect publications related to the topic of the work in question.
Leading the way today is the Google Scholar “related” list. For example, in the bibliographic system
mathnet.ru this list can be obtained by clicking on the link “Related articles on Google Scholar”. The
number of such works offered by Google Scholar is incredibly large, but the quality of their selection
is still poor. In particular, Google Scholar apparently uses the names of the authors of the publication
in question as one of the search attributes, so a noticeable part of the results is made up of works that
are not related to the topic under consideration, but written by the authors' namesakes.
Elibrary.ru also collects a list of related publications. This list accompanies each publication and is
linked to by a link titled “Find related publications”. And here the reader is offered tens of thousands
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of answers, the quality of these answers is also not always pleasing, although it surpasses the quality of
the results of Google Scholar.
Lists of related publications are widely distributed and use a variety of mechanisms. For example,
interesting results are obtained in the project Connected papers [4], where, when searching for related
publications, the proximity of publications is understood not as the presence of direct bibliographic
links between articles, but the proximity of their bibliographic lists.
And yet, the reader is usually most interested in the main subject of this article - the reverse
bibliography: the mechanism of its construction is clear to the reader, and at the same time, the results
are of undoubted benefit. Note that dynamic bibliographic lists with obvious construction algorithms
are currently the most in-demand. Among them, along with the reverse bibliography, it is necessary to
note the ORCID apparatus [5], which allows the reader, in one click to see the list of publications of
the author he is interested in.
7. Conclusion
The reverse bibliography, generally speaking, lies in wait for dangers similar to those who played a
fatal role in the fate of the interesting project COinS [6]. An unscrupulous author can significantly spoil
the attitude towards this dynamic construction by including in the bibliography of his work a link to an
outstanding scientific publication not in essence, but only in the expectation that his work will be
noticed due to its appearing in the widely sought-after list of those citing this outstanding publication.
Fortunately, such a development of events now seems unlikely.
The reverse bibliography is slowly becoming a must-have in today's online publishing environment.
We can only be glad for the online reader, who has acquired such a useful tool for working with
scientific literature.
8. References
[1] Y. Gao, Q. Wu, L. Zhu, Merging the citations received by arXiv-deposited e-prints and their
corresponding published journal articles: Problems and perspectives, Information Processing &
Management 57 5 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2020.102267.
[2] R. McCullough. Preprints are now in Scopus!, blog.scopus.
URL: https://blog.scopus.com/posts/preprints-are-now-in-scopus.
[3] Open Ukrainian Citation Index (OUCI). URL: https://ouci.dntb.gov.ua.
[4] Connected papers. URL: https://www.connectedpapers.com.
[5] ORCID connecting research and researchers. URL: https://orcid.org.
[6] COinS (ContextObjects in Spans). URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COinS.
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