Yeah, I am beginning to wonder, based on these really helpful replies, if I
need to scale back to what is "doable" and "reasonable." And reassess
ParsCit.

Thanks to all for this additional information.

Steve

On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Nate Vack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Steve Oberg <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > I fully realize how much of a risk that is in terms of reliability and
> > maintenance.  But right now I just want a way to do this in bulk with a
> high
> > level of accuracy.
>
> How bad is it, really, if you get some (5%?) bad requests into your
> document delivery system? Customers submit poor quality requests by
> hand with some frequency, last I checked...
>
> Especially if you can hack your system to deliver the original
> citation all the way into your doc delivery system, you may be able to
> make the case that 'this is a good service to offer; let's just deal
> with the bad parses manually.'
>
> Trying to solve this via pure technology is gonna get into a world of
> diminishing returns. A surprising number of citations in references
> sections are wrong. Some correct citations are really hard to parse,
> even by humans who look at a lot of citations.
>
> ParsCit has, in my limited testing, worked as well as anything I've
> seen (commercial or OSS), and much better than most.
>
> My $0.02,
> -Nate
>