Our Development team continually works to improve how our software handles customers’ content. Collaborating closely with our Support and Configuration teams to keep on top of what improvements are needed, Development works on every aspect of our software, and a major focus is always our suite of reference processing tools, which were originally developed for eXtyles but now also form the basis of Edifix!

Every new version of eXtyles we ship to a customer includes Release Notes detailing what has been fixed, upgraded, and added since the previous release.

If you haven’t been reading your Release Notes, we encourage you to do so!

Meanwhile, here’s a quick snapshot of some improvements we made to eXtyles reference processing during 2019.

Getting more flexible: Improvements to handle the variety of things authors do with references

• We’ve improved our code to better recognize journal references when the reference is damaged or incomplete and the journal title isn’t in the eXtyles journal database (Build 4378) or when the reference has an issue number but no volume number (Build 4379). These improvements enable us to more effectively check entries against the Cabells Blacklist in order to flag references to predatory or fraudulent journals, which we don’t include in our internal database.

→ Our journal database now includes more than 50,000 titles, and we’re adding more all the time! You can help by submitting unrecognized journal titles and ISSNs to [email protected]!

•  We’ve improved how we handle month and day indicators at the end of journal references when the year appears after the author list (Build 4383) as well as journal references that include a month and year but no volume, issue, or page numbers (Build 4383).

→ For example:

Yamanaka, Y., Honma, S. & Honma, K.I. (2013) Daily exposure to running-wheel entrains circadian rhythms in mice in parallel with development of pre-exposure increase in spontaneous movement. American Journal of Physiology. Oct 9, PMID: 24108869

Moran, W.T. (1954). “Admixtures for concrete” A.C.I. Committee 212 report. Journal Am. Concrete Institute, October, 1954.

MINKUS-MCKENNA, D., ASHMAN, H. and MOSKOWITZ, H.R. 2004. Diabetes products: What health care marketers need to know to improve effectiveness of the shopping experience. Int. J. Med. Market. (April), 119-128.

Kramer, D. 2001. “Hedge Fund Disasters: Avoiding the Next Catastrophe” Alternative Investment Quarterly, no. 1 (October):5.

• We’ve added “submitted to” and “accepted to” to our list of indicators that a reference entry is unpublished (Build 4387).

→ The list also includes early release, in press, in progress, preprint, submitted, this issue, this volume, and under review!

• We’ve added support for some idiosyncratic author styles (Build 4330), including starting each reference with a hyphen and using bracketed reference numbers with the first bracket inverted.

→ These are just some of the improvements that have grown out of our work on eXtyles Arc! In improving eXtyles Arc, our development team (and our software!) is learning to handle ever more idiosyncratic author errors.

• Thanks to our work on eXtyles Arc—which is designed to work with new submissions as well as accepted papers—we can now support Auto-Styling of reference headings that contain multi-part numbers (Build 4334) and extraneous text (Build 4353), and we’ve also improved how we handle references that have been anonymized for peer review (Build 4342).

→ For example: 1.6. References; References (max. 20 references)

→ For example: Author (2014)

• We’ve improved how Auto-Styling handles hard returns occurring before “Journal of” (Build 4354) and added support for a hard return in the last item of a numbered reference list (Build 4356).

Getting more comprehensive: Improvements to better address our customers’ content and requirements

• We’ve added support for edition numbers in German book references and taught eXtyles to tag German EU Directives as legal (<lgl>) references (Build 4155).
• We’ve updated eXtyles to recognize newspaper titles where the title is given in italics and the city is in roman (Build 4268).

→ For example: Anonymous (1938) List of candidates who receive certificates, Advertiser (Adelaide), 25 January, 7.

• eXtyles can now identify comments such as “cited 2019 Mar 18” as access dates and can identify access dates [in brackets] rather than mistaking them for comments (Build 4270).
• We’ve expanded support for marking Code of Federal Register (CFR) references as legal references (<lgl>), especially in the format 10 CFR 42 (Build 4273).
• We’ve added support for online access dates in the form MM/DD/YYYY (Build 4305).

→ For example: Last accessed: 12/13/2001

• We’ve added support for marking document numbers in book (<bok>) references (Build 4300), including those that appear after the book title or edition number (Build 4311).

→ For example:

CLSI. Clinical Laboratory Safety; Approved Guideline—Third Edition. CLSI document GP17-A3. Wayne, PA: Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute; 2012.

CLSI. Performance Standards for Antimicrobial Disk Susceptibility Tests 13th ed. CLSI standard M02. Wayne, PA: Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute; 2018.

CLSI/NCCLS. Laboratory Automation: Specimen Container/Specimen Carrier; Approved Standard. CLSI/NCCLS document AUTO01-A. Wayne, PA: NCCLS; 2000.

CLSI. Essential Elements of a Phlebotomy Training Program. 1st ed. CLSI guideline GP48. Wayne, PA: Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute; 2017. 

• As part of our development work to identify and flag predatory and fraudulent journals, we’ve improved support for abbreviated journal names that are not in the eXtyles journal database and that start with a geographic adjective such as Asian, Canadian, or European (Build 4377). Predatory publishers often add regional adjectives to journal titles in an effort to make them look legitimate.

→ Our journal database now includes more than 50,000 titles, and we’re adding more all the time! You can help by submitting unrecognized journal titles and ISSNs to [email protected].

• We’ve added support for references that start with a with lowercase author surname (Build 4335).

→ Examples include boyd, danah; hooks, bell; and cummings, e.e.

Getting more innovative: Improvements and new features

• We’ve developed a prototype for flagging references to journals on the Cabells blacklist.

→ Please contact us for information about the availability of this feature!

• We’ve improved our fuzzy matching algorithm to do a better job of distinguishing between an article on PubMed and other items related to that article, such as a a correction (Build 4270) or a letter to the editor (Build 4309).

→ Ongoing work on our fuzzy matching processes reduces overall false-positive rates!

Questions? Feedback on your latest release? Contact us at [email protected]!