NAME

Biblio::Citation::Compare - Perl extension for performing fuzzy comparisons between bibliographic citations

SYNOPSIS

  use Biblio::Citation::Compare 'sameWork','sameAuthors';

  sameWork(
    # first item
    {
        authors => ['Bourget, D','Lukasiak, Zbigniew'],
        title => "A paper with such and such a title",
        date => 2010
    },
    # second item
    {
        authors => ['Bourget, David J. R.','Lukasiak, Zbigniew'],
        title => "A paper with such nd such a tlitle",
        date => undef
    }
  );

  # true!

  sameAuthors(
    ['Dave Bourget','Z Lukasiak'],
    ['Bourget DJR','Zbigniew Z. Lukasiak']
  );

  # true!

DESCRIPTION

This module exports two subroutines which perform fuzzy comparisons between citations (described using Perl hashes) and author lists. The subroutine attempt to determine if the citations and author lists refer to the same works and ordered lists of authors, respectively.

SUBROUTINES

sameWork(hashref citation1, hashref citation2): boolean

Takes as input two citations in a simple format illustrated in the synopsis. Returns true iff the two citations plausibly refer to the same work. A number of factors are taken into account to make the evaluation resistant to random variations. Among them: names are normalized and compared fuzzily using Text::Names, allowances are made for random typos, allowances are made for short and long versions of titles (esp with titles containing a colon), small but important variations as in "Paper title part 1" and "Paper title part 2" are taken into account. The algorithm has been used to merge multiple data sources on PhilPapers.org.

Some advanced additional parameters are not explained here; they can only be explained by pointing to the source code. Their use should not normally be necessary.

sameAuthors(arrayref list1, arrayref list2): boolean

Returns true if the two lists are plausibly lists of the same authors. This is merely a convenient wrapper over Text::Names::samePerson.

EXPORT

None by default.

SEE ALSO

See also Text::Names for name normalization.

AUTHOR

David Bourget, http://www.dbourget.com

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2011 by David Bourget

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.10.1 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.