“Test a citation”: improvements thanks to the Toulouse community

A new version of the “Test a citation” tool, part of AutiHub’s “Scientific reference citation checks” project, has been prepared thanks to feedback from testers in the Toulouse community.

Many thanks for their work, detailed reports and the time they have spent testing! Their contributions help us improve the quality of this tool, which compares the information in a cited reference with that of publications retrieved from bibliographic databases.

Minimum requirements: an author, a year and a title

The new version requires three pieces of information to run a search: the first cited author, the year and the publication title. It therefore applies the same requirements as the “Scientific references cited in ‘Thérapie Autisme’ content” corpus. The journal, DOI and additional authors remain optional.

Why require the title? A citation such as “Cascio, 2008” is not, on its own, enough to identify the intended study precisely. For example, entering “Cascio” as the author, “2008” as the year and “Tactile perception in adults with autism: a multidimensional psychophysical study” as the title does allow the tool to find and correctly identify the existing study. This identification was already possible before the update, when all three pieces of information were provided. The update now makes the title mandatory, in line with the existing requirements for the corpus.

The title also allows the Jaccard index to be calculated. This compares significant words in the cited title with those in the retrieved title and helps select between the references returned by the different search methods.

Open the “Test a citation” tool · Read the corpus methodology