The OUTCITE project is an initiative taken to improve the accessibility and linking of citation data, particularly in the social sciences. Extending the previous EXCITE project, which identified gaps in bibliographic databases, OUTCITE focuses on linking references that are not easily found in existing databases, such as incomplete citations, and web resources. The project developed tools to process and match these "non-source items" to their original sources, thereby enhancing the completeness of citation records available for research.
The core objective of the project was to develop a scalable toolchain that could accurately link these non-source items to their corresponding sources.
As of the project’s completion, OUTCITE has processed over 74,500 PDF documents from the SSOAR repository, ingesting more than 3.5 million references into the GESIS Search database. About 1.76 million of these references have been successfully linked to their online sources. The citation data has been shared with the OpenCitations initiative for further processing.
Furthermore, the project has been disseminated by publishing papers for the research outcomes. This has been presented in various workshops and conferences conducted and attended during the project tenure.
A public demo (https://demo-outcite.gesis.org) is available to test the outcomes of the project. Simply upload a PDF and wait until processed. It might take several minutes for processing based upon the various factors like size of the pdf and number of references etc.