Always improving services
Written by Martin Rittman, product designer at Crossref
Event Data is our service to capture online mentions of Crossref records. We monitor data archives, Wikipedia, social media, blogs, news, and other sources. Our main focus has been on gathering data from external sources, however we know that there is a great deal of Crossref metadata that can be made available as events. Earlier this year we started adding relationship metadata, and over the last few months we have been working on bringing in citations between records.
Our members deposit references alongside other metadata, and we have a lot of them. In fact, we have over 1.2 billion, with hundreds of thousands of new references added each day. While our metadata APIs make it easy to see which works are cited, it is much more difficult to find a list of citations to a specific work. We can make this easier by presenting citations as events in Event Data. Now that the huge majority of our members have responded positively to the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) campaign and Crossref's open-by-default reference policy, the move to make this data available via Event Data is a natural step.