Citations in Economics is at a very primitive stage of development. Data distributed through this service may be used for information retrieval purposes but should be take very carefully for scientific evaluation activities. That is because:

• only a fraction of electronic documents have been analysed at the moment, namely the 74% of the available documents. There are several conditions a document should fulfill to be analysed:
  • to be available in electronic format
  • to be freely available in the internet
  • to be in PDF or PostScript formats
  • the url provided should point to the document itselft, not to an intermediate abstract page
  • it should be possible to convert the PDF file into ASCII format
  • software should be able to recognize the references
• the processing of documents is being done automatically. There still are errors and omissions in the identification of references. We are working to improve the software in order to increase the accuracy level in the parsing process.