Skip to Main Content
Skip to main content
Library

Journal Publishing Guide

Including References & Citations

Most items published in academic journals contain reference lists, but these references often aren’t included in article metadata. The University of Alberta Library is shifting to include more citation information in journal metadata so that it can be extracted by CrossRef and made easier to analyze for the wider academic community.

OJS can connect to CrossRef and deposit reference metadata for your journal; all you have to do is cite using DOIs, compile references for each work, and turn on the settings!

If you'd like some help with these steps, please don't hesitate to contact library.publishing@ualberta.ca!

Turning on the Crossref Reference Linking Plugin

To deposit your references with CrossRef, you first need to have the CrossRef Reference Linking plugin installed on your journal’s OJS site. If it’s installed, it should appear under the “Generic Plugins” heading at Website Settings > Plugins > Installed Plugins.

 

Under the 'Generic Plugins' heading, the Crossref Reference Linking plugin has been highlighted, and the checkbox beside it has been checked.

 

If the plugin doesn’t appear on this page, email us at library.publishing@ualberta.ca so we can install the plugin for you.

Once CrossRef Reference Linking is installed, simply check the box beside it on the Installed Plugins page to activate the plugin. Refresh the page and make sure that the box is still checked.

Enabling Reference Submission as Part of Article Metadata

On your journal’s OJS platform, go to Workflow Settings > Submission > Metadata. Scroll down to the “References” options and check “Enable references metadata.”

 

 Beneath the 'References' heading, a box labelled 'Enable references metadata' has been checked.

 

You can choose how you want to manage references for future issues: you can ask authors to enter their reference metadata in a separate text box when they submit their articles (either optional or mandatory), or you can leave the references to be entered by journal editors. Letting the journal handle reference extraction may be extra work for the editors, but there will likely be more formatting errors if authors enter their own reference information.

Adding References to Article Metadata

Go to the article and copy the full citations from the references section of the document. This is much easier to do with an editable file format, such as a Word document. Errors and loss of formatting are much more common when copying and pasting citations from PDFs.

 

Paste the citations into the “References” textbox under Submissions > [specific article] > Publication > References.

 

On the publication tab of an OJS submission page, the References section is open. The 'References' section is mainly taken up by an empty text field. A cursor in the top left corner of the text box hovers above a pop-up menu, with the 'paste as plain text' option highlighted.

 

Format the pasted references so that they are usable by the Cited-by function (See the PKP Issue and Article Metadata guidelines for more detail).

  • Use any citation style, as long as you are consistent. Make sure references are complete and correct so that the metadata can be used properly.

  • If available, digital object identifiers (DOIs) are usually preferred to other URLs. Format your DOIs by starting with "https://"

  • Don’t include a “References” heading in the textbox–OJS will add this for you.

  • Only put references from the bibliography at the end of the article into the reference field. Leave out footnotes and endnotes.

  • If an article or work doesn’t have any references, leave the field blank. The “References” heading won’t appear at all for articles where the text box is left blank, but if you enter “N/A” or anything else in the field, it will appear on the article page.

  • Make sure the references entered into OJS match the final citation section of the original article, especially if you’re extracting the references from a document other than the final galley. You’ll need to account for any revisions and edits made to the article after submission.

  • Each reference should be listed on its own line, and there should be no empty spaces between lines. You can check that your formatting is correct by viewing the “Publication” tab for each submission and pressing the “Preview” button. If your references are formatted correctly, individual references will be spaced apart like in the example pictured below.

  • Avoid including extra formatting in your references, whenever possible. The easiest way to do this is usually to copy and paste as plain text. Usually, references copied and pasted this way from a Word document will appear with appropriate line breaks, but text from PDFs may need more manual editing after pasting.

  • Your references should always be plain text–avoid XML or HTML formatting tags (e.g., <i></i>)

  • Omit list formatting, such as numbers and bullets. Even if the original works cited were given as a numbered list, the numbers shouldn’t be entered into the references field.

  • Include the author’s name in all references. Do not replace the author’s name with a dash or "ibid", even if you’re citing multiple works with the same author. You may need to manually add names to the references field if the original bibliography used dashes.

 

Citations entered into OJS should look something like this:

 

The text field under the 'References' heading contains reference text with no empty spaces between lines.

 

The resulting article page should look like this:

 

An article page is shown for "The Art of Learning HTML." A list of references appears on the page below the article's abstract; each reference appears as an individual block of text.

 

Once you’re done, save your changes. The references will be included as part of your article metadata. If the CrossRef Reference Linking plugin is already installed and turned on, articles published with references extracted will automatically deposit with CrossRef.

Depositing References for Backfiles

If you turn on the CrossRef Reference Linking plugin after you’ve already published articles with reference metadata, the reference data won’t be automatically sent to CrossRef. You can manually deposit the articles so that the reference metadata reaches CrossRef’s database.

 

Please contact library.publishing@ualberta.ca and we'd be happy to assist you with the back issue deposit!

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Sometimes, references copied and pasted as plain text from PDFs will lose line breaks completely. On the OJS dashboard, the result looks like this:

 

The 'References' text field is shown containing unformatted text. New citations do not start on new lines, and spaces between some words are missing where line breaks were deleted from the text.

 

Be careful–this looks very similar to a correctly formatted set of citations, but when you preview the article, the references will appear as one big block of text:

 

An article page is shown for "The Art of Learning OJS." Under the 'References' heading, the references have been combined into a single block of text. Some new reference entries start on the same line as the end of the previous entry.

 

The easiest way to avoid this problem is to copy the text from a Word document or Google Doc. If that isn’t an option, you may need to manually add line breaks back in.

 

 

 

Sometimes, extra formatting is carried over from copied references. For example, in the picture below, you can see that the references entered don’t take up the full length of the reference field:

 

The 'References' field contains text that doesn't extend across the full length of the text box.


 

In the article preview, the references have extra line breaks mid-citation:

 

On the article page for "The Art of Learning OJS," the references are listed in small chunks of text, one or two lines long. Each reference is split between multiple snippets of text.

 

You can fix this error by pasting the references as plain text–just make sure you don’t create any new formatting issues in the process.


 

If you include a heading in the reference field, the references on the article page will have duplicate headings.

 

In the "References" field, the word "References:" has been entered above the citation text.

 

On the article page, the references section has two titles.

 

If you don’t have any references to add to a submission, leave the reference field completely blank. If the field is blank, no “References” heading will appear on the article page, but if you enter something to show that the work has no references, whatever you type will be displayed.

 

On the 'Publication' tab of the OJS submission page, the 'References' field contains a single hyphen.

 

On the article page, the 'References' heading appears above a single hyphen.




If you have any questions, you can always email us at library.publishing@ualberta.ca for more help!