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 c

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the final authors' version, the published journal paper, an early version published in conference proceedings, or an unpublished extended version of the paper?