Reference‐linking: today’s realities, tomorrow’s promises

Reference‐linking has added a new dimension of value to works containing citations. It drastically reduces the labor involved in accessing referenced material by capitalizing on the ability of electronic items to point to each other. With the promise come a variety of issues that must be addressed before the full benefit can be realized. At the forefront of these are determining what to link to, determining appropriate copy, managing access and copyrights, and persistence of object identifiers. A number of initiatives are tackling these issues to various extents, and a number of publishers and vendors are enabling these technologies. Background, benefits, issues, projects, and employment of reference‐linking are examined to provide an overview of the current state of reference‐linking. A sampling of industry players is queried to obtain a variety of perspectives.