Constructing links to MathSciNet
The American Mathematical Society believes that using MathSciNet for linking to original papers fosters linking of the electronic literature, now and in the future. Authors or publishers can add a permanent link to the MathSciNet entry for each reference in a published paper using a standard format and tools provided free of charge by the Society. The Society in return will add links from MathSciNet to original papers whenever possible and keep those links up to date in the future. Readers are therefore able to navigate from any reference in two clicks, first to the MathSciNet entry and then to the original paper (when it is available). Soon, even users without a subscription to MathSciNet will be able to access original articles in this way.
There are a number of advantages to this linking scheme:
- Building links for authors and publishers of source articles is simpler, requiring a single format and tools that are provided free of charge.
- Building links allows authors and publishers to verify bibliographic data for journal articles using the Mathematical Reviews database. This results in more consistent references.
- Readers obtain two kinds of information: a review (or summary) and the original article. In many cases, the review may be more helpful than the article, and when the original article is unavailable to the reader, a review may be a good substitute.
- Our article links are based on DOIs, Digital Object Identifiers, registered with the CrossRef organization (www.crossref.org). We have article links based DOIs from more than 1000 journals. For more information on CrossRef please visit their site
- The older literature from the past 60 years becomes part of the web immediately through reviews of the papers. As these older articles become available online, new links will be added automatically, without any action by source publishers.
The American Mathematical Society provides several tools for constructing these links.
MR Lookup
MR Lookup provides bibliographic lookups using a simple interactive form and returns standardized bibliographic data and direct links that may be inserted in web aware environments. There is a batch version of MR Lookup that is described here.MRef
MRef can be used whenever a reference can be copied and pasted as text. For example, the reference might be copied as text from a Web page, from a PDF document, or from a file presented in a TeX/AMS-TeX/LaTeX application.Make Link
While using MathSciNet there are two mechanisms provided to copy permanent MathSciNet links. Both are easily accessible to users via Make Link. The instructions are here.
We hope that the community will make a commitment to add these links to all new papers, and will encourage publishers to include links in all electronic literature.
