Documentation

How to participate in Cited-by

Members can participate in Cited-by by completing the following steps:

1. Deposit references for one or more prefixes as part of your content registration process. Use your Participation Report to see your progress with depositing references. This step is not mandatory, but highly recommended to ensure that your citation counts are complete.
2. We will match the metadata in the references to DOIs to establish Cited-by links in the database. As new content is registered, we automatically update the citations and, for those members with Cited-by alerts enabled, we notify you of the new links.
3. Retrieve citations through a URL query or the admin tool.
4. Display the links on your website. We recommend displaying citations you retrieve on DOI landing pages, for example:

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If you are a member through a Sponsor, you may have access to Cited-by through your sponsor – please contact them for more details. OJS users can use the Cited-by plugin.

Citation matching

Members sometimes submit references without including a DOI tag for the cited work. When this happens, we look for a match based on the metadata provided. If we find one, the reference metadata is updated with the DOI and we add the "doi-asserted-by": "crossref" tag. If we don’t find a match immediately, we will try again at a later date.

There are some references for which we won’t find matches, for example where a DOI has been registered with an agency other than Crossref (such as DataCite) or if the reference refers to an object without a DOI, including conferences, manuals, blog posts, and some journals’ articles.

To perform matching, we first check if a DOI tag is included in the reference metadata. If so, we assume it is correct and link the corresponding work. If there isn’t a DOI tag, we perform a search using the metadata supplied and select candidate results by thresholding. The best match is found through a further validation process. Learn more about how we match references. The same process is used for the results shown on our Simple Text Query tool.

All citations to a work are returned in the corresponding Cited-by query.