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About The Early Reference Project
[To be edited and corrected:] We want to know more about how scientists interacted with each other back before the advent of modern reference formats. Today, proper citations are the bane of every student project, and plagiarism is a serious concern. However, back before the advent of the modern scientific journal system, citations were a haphazard affair. The format and content were largely up to the writer.
While this arrangement was easy on the authors, it makes it difficult to track the way scientists engaged with each other. We want to solve this problem by taking scanned scientific papers, and identify the location where references are present. From there, we can convert the image to text, input it into our document tracking system, and build the network of connections we currently lack.