The way we cite: common metadata used across disciplines for defining bibliographic references

Current citation practices observed in articles are very noisy, confusing, and not standardised at all, making the identification of the cited works problematic for humans and any reference extraction software. In this work, we want to investigate such citation practices for referencing different types of entities and, in particular, for understanding what the most used metadata in bibliographic references are. We identified 36 different types of cited entities (the most cited ones were articles, books, and proceeding papers) within the 34,140 bibliographic references extracted from a huge set of journal articles on 27 different subject areas. The analysis of such bibliographic references, grouped by the particular type of cited entities, enabled us to highlight the most used metadata for defining bibliographic references across the subject areas. However, we also noticed that, in some cases, bibliographic references did not provide the essential elements to easily identify the work they refer to.