Referencing behaviours across disciplines: publication types and common metadata for defining bibliographic references

In this work, we investigate existing citation practices by analysing a huge set of articles published in journals to measure which metadata are used across the various scholarly disciplines, independently from the particular citation style adopted, for defining bibliographic reference. We selected the most cited journals in each of the 27 subject areas listed in the SCImago Journal Rank in the 2015-2017 triennium according to the SCImago total cites ranking. Each journal in the sample was represented by five articles (in PDF format) published in the most recent issue published in October 2019, for a total of 729 articles. We extracted all 34,140 bibliographic references in the bibliographic references lists of these articles. Finally, we detected the types of cited works in each discipline and the structure of bibliographic references and in-text reference pointers for each type of cited work. By analysing the data gathered, we observed that the bibliographic references in our sample referenced 36 different types of cited works. Such a considerable variety of publications revealed the existence of particular citing behaviours in scientific articles that varied from subject area to subject area.