scope:

Summary

The NISO Metasearch Initiative, Task Group 3/SubGroup 3, on Required Citation Metadata has discussed the issues around citation metadata and its relation to metasearch. Citation references have been devised in a paper world, assuming page numbers and enveloping journals and publishers. But searchers will use metasearch engines to search, find, and retrieve individual articles. There are a number of extant issues that must be addressed to allow smooth and seamless metasearching across multiple resources. The Google™ Scholar approach is to access the full-text content of all available journals and provide a heterogeneous data store. Unfortunately, for researchers, they need fine tuning of their search experience with relevant metadata so as not to be swamped by irrelevant references. Our proposed approach is simply to have a consistency in the format and content of citation metadata.