Missing citation data is a frequent reason that authors contact us. Of course everyone wants to know that their citations are accounted for as consistently and comprehensively as possible. But there are some structural limitations to how much we can do.
Crossref’s Cited-by data only reflects the instances when a given DOI is matched as being cited by another piece of content that:
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is also registered with Crossref and
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has references included in the metadata deposited by the publisher when they register its DOI.
Not all scholarly publications are registered with Crossref and not all publishers opt to provide references along with their DOI’s metadata (at least not yet! but we’re trying to encourage them), so we don’t claim that our cited-by counts are totally comprehensive.
Even so, sometimes when an author contacts us because a citation isn’t showing up for their work, they know that the citing work is registered with Crossref, and they know that its from a publisher that typically does supply references. In these cases, there are two possibilities. Either our reference matching system missed a valid match, or the reference supplied by the citing work’s publisher wasn’t quite right.
When our matching isn’t quite right, there’s not much we can do in the short term, but we will note that example to Cited-by product manager, so it can be taken into account for future improvements to the citation matching system.
But, when the relevant reference in the metadata of the citing work needs a little adjustment, we can reach out to that work’s publisher and request an update. Here’s one example.
An author reported that their article
Chugunova, N., Polyakova, T., Narozhnyaya, A., & Lisetskii, F. (2023). Current Challenges to the Sustainable Development of Rural Communities in Russia's Central Chernozem Region. Rural and Regional Development, 1(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.35534/rrd.2023.10001
was cited by this article:
Lisetskii, F. N., & Buryak, Z. A. (2023). Runoff of Water and Its Quality under the Combined Impact of Agricultural Activities and Urban Development in a Small River Basin. Water, 15(13), 2443. https://doi.org/10.3390/w15132443
but that citation wasn’t showing up in Crossref’s cited-by data. When we checked, the reference supplied in the metadata for the citing work looked like this:
<citation key="ref_79">
<author>Chugunova</author>
<article_title>Current challenges to the sustainable development of rural communities in Russia’s Central Chernozem Region</article_title>
<journal_title>Rural. Reg. Dev.</journal_title>
<cYear>2023</cYear>
<volume>1</volume>
<first_page>10001</first_page>
</citation>
The first author’s surname, article title, volume number, and publication year were all correct. The journal title abbreviation was good enough. But the first page number was way off. That’s what prevented the citation match.
In this instance, we were able to get in touch with MDPI, the publisher of that citing work 10.3390/w15132443 and asked them to submit an updated metadata deposit with that reference above corrected to this:
<citation key="ref_79">
<doi>10.35534/rrd.2023.10001</doi>
<author>Chugunova</author>
<article_title>Current challenges to the sustainable development of rural communities in Russia’s Central Chernozem Region</article_title>
<journal_title>Rural and Regional Development</journal_title>
<cYear>2023</cYear>
<volume>1</volume>
<first_page>1</first_page>
<last_page>9</last_page>
</citation>
MDPI replied promptly and said that they resubmit the metadata for that item. But, unfortunately, it looks like they were unable to effect that particular change to the reference. There are sometimes system limitations that make what seems like a simple update quite challenging for publishers’ operations teams. References are often embedded quite deeply in their publishing workflows, and it can be difficult to make small adjustments to without having to start from the beginning and effectively “republish” the whole article.
Because page numbers are used less and less often, article ID numbers have sometimes replaced them or are used interchangeably, and authors are often working from manuscript versions of articles when they’re constructing their reference lists, discrepancies in first page numbers account for a lot of the citation problems that are communicated to us. So, we may need to reconsider how heavily they’re weighted in our citation matching in the future.