Inera’s Development team continually works to improve how our software handles customers’ content. Collaborating closely with Inera’s Support team 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, originally developed for eXtyles and now also forming the basis for 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 2018.

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

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, an author comes up with something new! Here are some changes we’ve made over the past year to improve how eXtyles and Edifix handle authors’ creative approaches to bibliographic references:

• We’ve added support for “Selected samples include” at the beginning of a chemistry-style reference list (Build 3932).
• We’ve updated the reference processing code to look for bad DOI formatting, such as “https://doi:” and “doi:” (Build 3952).
  → This helps in those cases when authors diligently provide DOIs for their reference list, but don’t get the format quite right!
• We’ve added both “preprint” and “early release” to our list of indicators that a reference entry is unpublished (Build 3957).
  → The list also includes in press, this volume, this issue, submitted, under review, and in progress!
• We’ve added support for the use of a period before extra pages, as in “682-690. discussion 700-4” (Build 4005).
  → The comma and semicolon are also supported.
• We’ve updated our code to make sure eXtyles and Edifix can handle very long author lists (i.e., 30 or more authors) that contain at least one damaged author name (Build 4111).

Getting more cooperative: Improvements to better handle interactions with third parties

Our integrations with the PubMed and Crossref databases are a key benefit for many eXtyles and Edifix users, which makes it especially important for us to keep on top of changes, updates, and recommendations from these other organizations! Here are some changes we’ve made over the past year to improve how eXtyles and Edifix interact with metadata from Crossref and PubMed:

• We’ve adjusted some rules used in matching journal references to the PubMed database, so that part of the article title must match for the result to be valid (Build 3900).
  → By acting in cases where the match was previously too fuzzy, this change reduces the rate of false positive matches.
• We’ve added a cleanup routine to cope with PubMed records that have a hard return in the middle of an article title (Build 3913).
  → Of course this phenomenon shouldn’t happen—but since it sometimes does, we’ve made sure eXtyles can now handle it smoothly!
• We’ve added support to handle MathML, displayed in PubMed XML records as of June 1, 2018 (Build 3929).
  → The default support mimics previous PubMed handling without MathML; that is, “[Formula: see text]” is inserted at the point of the MathML in a Word comment, but the reference itself is not altered.
• We’ve added support for NCBI API keys so that PubMed queries can proceed without any performance throttling and you can complete your eXtyles work expeditiously (Build 4063).
  → If you use PubMed Correction and haven’t yet got your API key(s) in place, please see our FAQs!
  → Inera’s technical team worked closely with PubMed to ensure that the NCBI API Key solution would work well for both organizational and individual users.
• We’ve turned on Crossref author-title queries for journal references (Build 4037).
  → This process helps eXtyles link journal references when the data either in the reference or at Crossref is incomplete or inaccurate.
  → Inera’s technical team worked closely with Crossref on this feature to maximize DOI returns while avoiding false-positive matches.

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

Our customer base has been growing and changing since we launched eXtyles, and we make sure that our software grows and changes to meet our users’ needs! Here are some changes we’ve made over the past year to help eXtyles and Edifix better handle the content our customers are producing:

• We’ve added support for city names that include slashes, such as “Frankfurt/ Main” (Build 3935).
  → City names occur in book references as place of publication (styled bib_location).
• We’ve added the ability to query PubMed with a DOI if an author-provided DOI appears in a reference (Build 3988).
  → This feature is particularly useful for content that cites article titles in languages other than English.
• We’ve added the ability to parse journal references that include a year and a PubMed ID but have no volume, issue, or page numbers (Build 4004).
  → This style is yet one more creative way that authors cite articles that appear online ahead of print.
• We’ve updated URL validation so that when an http:// URL redirects to an otherwise identical https:// URL, eXtyles updates the URL automatically and, instead of adding individual Word Comments, gives a total number of updated URLs in the alert at the end of the process (Build 4108).
  → You should now see far fewer comments when you run URL Checking, as most websites have moved to secure URLs!

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