CITATIONS IN HYPERMEDIA - MAINTAINING CRITICAL LINKS

The lack of complete and accurate citations for referenced works is a persistent and significant problem in scholarly writing. The advent of new forms of electronic publishing, especially hypermedia, has the potential for either aggravating or alleviating this problem. Incorrect and missing citations will become more prevalent (and, indeed, have become so within large bibliographic databases) without a concerted and cooperative effort on the part of systems developers to provide adequate references and the means for easily accessing and downloading them. This article examines some of the basic issues involved in the problem of maintaining the critical authorship links between source and expression in one specific form of electronic publishing-hypermedia-and proposes some solutions.