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Hyperlinking references in PDFs is trivial for authors if they use LaTeX and the journal/conference template supports it. It's just a matter of ensuring that th

Hyperlinking references in PDFs is trivial for authors if they use LaTeX and the journal/conference template supports it. It's just a matter of ensuring that the bibtex entry has an URL or a DOI, and most bibtex entries copied and pasted from curated sources already have them. If you are finding many papers without hyperlinked references, it's probably just because they're published in journals whose templates don't support it. In my particular research field, most publication venues' templates starting supporting those links around 3-4 years ago, so my papers from, say, 2015 have no hyperlinks in references, while those from 2019 do. This didn't require any significant extra effort on my part, in fact in general it requires less because well-curated bibtex entries are easier to come by now than some years ago.

IshKebab 5y ago
It's not adding the links that is hard. It's choosing the destination URL. Where do you link to? I guess you could link to doi.org. Probably better than nothing but still not ideal because it doesn't actually take you to the PDF. Can you show an example paper with links?
- foobarbecue 5y ago
  DOI is the correct thing to link to because the author or publisher has chosen this as their canonical URL for the object. The DOI could and sometimes does point to the pdf, it's just conventional to point to an html version of the paper. It would make a lot of sense to me to standardize a field in the DOI metadata containing the PDF URL. (source: I manage the DataCite membership of a large organization)
- jltsiren 5y ago
  Linking directly to the PDF is usually the wrong choice. When you find a new paper, you often want to get the citation metadata, which the PDF document rarely contains in a convenient form. There are often multiple versions of the same paper, and you may want to determine which version you managed to find. Is it a preprint, the final authors' version, the published journal paper, an early version published in conference proceedings, or an unpublished extended version of the paper?

IshKebab 5y ago

It's not adding the links that is hard. It's choosing the destination URL. Where do you link to? I guess you could link to doi.org. Probably better than nothing but still not ideal because it doesn't actually take you to the PDF. Can you show an example paper with links?

foobarbecue 5y ago
DOI is the correct thing to link to because the author or publisher has chosen this as their canonical URL for the object. The DOI could and sometimes does point to the pdf, it's just conventional to point to an html version of the paper. It would make a lot of sense to me to standardize a field in the DOI metadata containing the PDF URL. (source: I manage the DataCite membership of a large organization)
jltsiren 5y ago
Linking directly to the PDF is usually the wrong choice. When you find a new paper, you often want to get the citation metadata, which the PDF document rarely contains in a convenient form. There are often multiple versions of the same paper, and you may want to determine which version you managed to find. Is it a preprint, the final authors' version, the published journal paper, an early version published in conference proceedings, or an unpublished extended version of the paper?