What to do when a reference needs review

SmartReferences corrects most references on its own, but some come back needing a human eye. When that happens, the job report lists them and, where useful, SmartReferences leaves a short comment on the reference in the document. This article walks through what each signal means and what to do about it, in the order you're likely to meet them.

The one habit that ties all of it together: when a reference needs help, make one change and re-run SmartReferences, so you always know which change did the work. That's the same discipline Helping Edifix tag a difficult reference relies on.

Where to look

The job report is your starting point. Its review list names the references that need attention by number—for example, "3 need manual review (refs 12, 45, 46)." Each of those references also carries a comment in your document explaining what happened, and the original text is preserved unchanged.

So the report tells you which references, and the document holds the reference exactly as it came in.

A reference left unchanged

SmartReferences never deletes a reference it can't confidently replace. When it can't place a corrected version, it leaves the original in place, and explains why in a comment.

A reference left unchanged usually means Edifix couldn't settle on what kind of reference it is, or couldn't find a matching record to rebuild it from. The fix is the trimming discipline covered in the help article, Helping Edifix tag a difficult reference. This gives Edifix a cleaner, leaner reference so it can identify the type and look up the record. Start there.

A verify comment

Sometimes SmartReferences recovers a reference by sending it to Edifix again on its own, and then asks you to confirm the result is right. There are two kinds of verify comments, and the difference matters.

• A DOI or PMID confirms the match. A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) or PMID (PubMed Identifier) lined up between the original and the corrected reference. That's a strong confirmation—the identifier points at exactly one record—so a quick read-through is usually enough.
  

  "This reference was recovered by reprocessing it on its own; a matching DOI/PMID confirms the record. Please verify."

• Title and author confirm the match, with no identifier. There was no identifier to lean on; the match rests on the title and author agreeing. That can be right and often is, but title-and-author agreement is weaker than an identifier, so check this one harder. Read the corrected reference against the original and confirm they are the same work before you accept it.
  

  "This reference was recovered by reprocessing it on its own and matched by title and author, with no DOI or PMID to confirm it. Please verify."

In both cases the ask is the same and it's a narrow one: confirm the corrected reference is the same work as the one you started with. It's proportionate—light when an identifier confirms the record, more careful when nothing does.

For more on why a DOI/PMID match is trusted more than a title-and-author match, see What do PubMed and Crossref Correction and Linking do? and Is data from PubMed and Crossref always reliable?.

A join comment

References sometimes arrive split across two lines by a stray line break, so what is really one reference reads as two. SmartReferences handles this in one of two ways, and tells you which.

• The lines join cleanly. SmartReferences joins them and leaves this comment on the reference that survives:
  

  "This reference was split across two lines by a stray line break; the lines were joined and the redundant line removed. Please review."

  Here the work is done. All that's asked is a read-through to confirm the joined reference reads correctly.

• The lines can't join automatically. SmartReferences leaves this comment on both lines instead:
  

  "This line appears to be part of a single reference split across two lines. Remove the stray line break and re-run."

  This one asks you to act: delete the stray line break by hand so the two lines become one reference, then run SmartReferences again. Once the reference is whole, SmartReferences can process it normally.

A reference that couldn't be aligned

Sometimes a reference doesn't line up with SmartReferences' corrected results at all—often because it's split across three or more lines (for example, from pasted PDF text), rather than the simple two-line break covered above. SmartReferences first tries to recover it automatically by resubmitting it on its own; if that works, you'll see the same verify comment covered in A verify comment above.

If the automatic recovery doesn't succeed, SmartReferences leaves the reference exactly as written and flags it instead:

"This reference could not be aligned with the corrected results — it may be split across multiple lines. The surrounding references were placed; remove any stray line breaks in this entry and re-run."

Every other reference in the document is placed normally; only this one needs your attention. Remove the stray line break(s) so the reference reads as a single entry, then run SmartReferences again.

Re-run one change at a time

Whichever of these you're resolving, keep to one change per re-run. Fix a single reference—trim it, join its lines, accept a verified correction—then run SmartReferences again and check the results before moving to the next. If a change works you'll know it was that change; if it doesn't, you'll know what to undo.

If the comment in front of you flags a duplicate rather than a recovery, see this help article: Understanding duplicate-reference comments.