Lessons from Large-Scale Reference Checking Implementations

Citation and Reference checking is vital for authenticity and credibility in scholarly publishing. On Vantage Viewpoint, Prashant Narekuli, a long time scholarly publishing specialist, discusses the challenges publishers face, why automation is crucial for handling high volumes of citations and references, the process using sources like Crossref and PubMed, and the benefits of integrating checks early. Get an insider's look at this essential workflow!

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Transcript

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of vantage Viewpoint podcast.
Today we are diving into behind the scenes look at reference checking, which is an essential yet often overlooked part of academic publishing. I have with me today Prashant Narekuli who has led large scale project implementations in this space. Welcome back to this podcast, Prashant.
Hey. Thanks, Sampath excited to be here.
Reference checking may seem like a small detail, but, it has a major impact on quality and discoverability in the academic publishing.
Ok, like always, Prashant, let's start with the basics. Right. For our listeners, what types of publications are most affected by reference checking?
Well, our work primarily supports, the scholarly, publishing, group, basically academic books and, journal articles. These are the places where you require, excellent.
References. And they are highly reference dependent.
And accuracy is critical for both reader readers as well as, indexing systems. So scholarly publishing is where we will primarily.
Okay. Now,as a publisher, what do you think are the typical issues, you would face when it comes to the print management prashant?
Well, on the top of my mind, I think there are three key challenges.
The first, being, author discipline. Not all authors, provide complete references. For various reasons, but, sometimes key details like doi or journal names are missing. So that's, that's
the topmost, challenge that we face. In addition to that, we, have the time to market where, both authors and publishers want rapid production timelines.
And, that's where reference quality ends up, suffering, because we have to do the same thing in a shorter period of time.
And, finally, the XML requirement where,
for proper archiving and online delivery preferences need to be cross-linked to both in text columns as well as external databases. So I think all these three put together do face, the key challenges, in reference management,
okay, prashant.
And also, being an engineering student myself, you know, I've seen my fair share of,
Stem textbooks and they have a lot of citations and references, and they keep refreshing every year. So I would imagine to keep up with the demand that the market has. Obviously, implementation is quite important, right. So let's talk about the implementation now.
How do these large scale reference checking projects usually work?
Well, there is a process, process to the, entire, workflow that we follow. We,first of all we granularly pass each reference to identify key citation components perform lookups using authoritative, sources like maybe Crossref for PubMed. Many others. But, in the scholarly world, Crossref public.
But one of the keysources, we also retrieve complete metadata, including is and PMI IDs very heavy label.
Then we automatically add URLs to citations for these identifiers, enriching incomplete references. Also is needed using available metadata.
And then we leave editorial comments in manuscripts to flag any discrepancies like any kind of author errors or, missing references.
Eventually we ensure all references are cross-linked within the manuscript and flagging missing references, that are cited in text but are not listed. That's also done. And maybe one of the last points would probably be on nothing extra references that are listed but not cited. 
So this largely completes the entire process, as part of the reference checking workflow.
Thanks for that, Prashant. You know, as a general public goes out in the market to buy a textbook, I would not necessarily know that there's so much that happens in the background.
Now that you have told me what happened, I believe that reference checking at this level sounds quite intense. Especially when it comes to books in Stem content.
Yes. That is. But, when it comes to very high volume citations, there is a lot of automation, that also is involved. So, Stem articles, often have 50 or more references and scholarly books may have hundreds.
And these large, a multiple would have thousands. So, manually checking all of these, at scale is not feasible. And that's where we do have,
a large number of, automation, tools that we've developed in, that's in place. So, for specifically for high volume citations, automation is the key.
Okay. Now, now, I believe that, you know, when you're quoting a citation or a reference, the quality obviously matters, right? So what are the sources that, you use to verify and retrieve the reference data?
Yeah. So the supported, databases, for reference retrieval, our systems are integrated in quite a few, major databases, major citation databases.
I had mentioned earlier about Crossref and PubMed, which are largely, a major source for all scholarly publishers. But in addition to that we also link to, the resources like the US Library of Congress ISBN database worldCAT database. 
So these sources help us validate and rich link citations accurately and efficiently.
Okay. Now, now, this tool right here is public. I believe it has all this, the automation and the database access, to, cross-check the references. It sounds really impressive. Now, is this entire process really automated?
Yeah, I this citation checking has to be, fully automated, because of the scale of operations that we run in especially when it comes to the article processing that happens in journals.
So, the automation primarily ensures, not only speed consistency, but also scalability, in journals and also in books. Books. While the numbers would be small, the number of pages that cut into books really require a whole lot of work.
so, yes. So we, we have, completely automated system, year publication, which helps in citation checking.
And it still, helps editors to review cases, which are,flagged off in the manuscript.
Okay. Now, now, correct me if I'm wrong, but, I learned that we have, delivered almost 150 million citations in our book so far and I think that's a mind boggling number if I have to look at it that way.
It's great that, you know, we have numbers to back our claims as well. So it's clear that, you know, clean,
cross-linked references, you know, critical for credibility and discoverability.
So do you have any closing thoughts for publishers who are considering automation prashant?
Yes, yes, yes.apex has been for so many years, processing on an average about 1.52 million pages of, journal articles.
Every year and, it's also compounded by almost equal amount of, pages that we, process. On the book side.
so, yes. So the,key thoughts and takeaways over here to, manage that amount of citations is that we start early, integrate reference checking into the production workflow at the start
of the workflow itself of article processing.
And then, the automation doesn't just save time, but also elevates the quality of the final product. So from that perspective
yes apex is able to help publishers in managing their citations and not only the citation with the ars publicare, we are also able to manage, the, word file structuring as well as, managing the
images that come in the articles or the books while attaching the
the context automatically to improve the, accessibility of that particular document.
Well said. Prashant, it really looks like. Yeah. Is ars publicare is the complete package. And, for all our listeners, and especially publishers, if you have high volume citation and reference work
I would urge you to consider apex covantage. And thanks for joining us today, prashant
and giving our listeners an inside look at how large scale reference checking actually works.
Thanks. Thanks, Sampath. And it's always been a pleasure to be on your show. Thanks.
Yeah. Prashant. Thank you. Glad to have you here as well.