March 17, 2015

What's New in Edifix 1.8

Our Boston-based office saw a lot of snow (A LOT of snow) and a lot of great development projects this winter. We released Edifix 1.8 this week in two stages.

Besides springtime weather, you can look forward to the following new Edifix features:

Duplicate Reference Checking

We heard your requests loud and clear! No longer will a duplicate reference go unnoticed by Edifix. Edifix will now scan your reference list for processed references that appear to be duplicates. If the references are identical or almost identical, Edifix will insert a warning to alert your keen editor eyes. Flagged duplicate references will not be deducted from your reference allowance. Hip hip hooray!

Punctuation Cleanup

You may have noticed that sometimes Edifix "corrects" punctuation to something that isn't quite right. For example, a title that contains a dash, such as this reference:

1. Christoffersen C, Nielsen LB. Apolipoprotein M— a new biomarker in sepsis. Crit Care. 2012;16(3):126.

is corrected to to this:

1. Christoffersen C, Nielsen LB. Apolipoprotein M--a new biomarker in sepsis. Crit Care. 2012;16(3):126.

This is because Edifix is really great at correcting punctuation surrounding a reference element - such as the periods and commas around an article title - but it relies on PubMed and CrossRef to make any corrections inside those elements, like a dash in an article title. When PubMed Linking and Data Correction is selected, the reference elements are corrected with data from the PubMed record; and sometimes titles contain double hyphens instead of an em dash. While PubMed records often contain correct data, the punctuation may not match the preferences of your editorial style.

Now, when Edifix corrects your reference, it will clean up the punctuation inside of reference elements as well as outside according to your editorial style.

For Enterprise users with custom style templates, the punctuation cleanup feature is configurable. That means that if your style uses a straight apostrophe rather than a curly apostrophe in an author name, Edifix can enforce that in your references, even if the PubMed or CrossRef record uses the opposite. Contact us to learn more!

Journal Database Additions

Our journal database plays a key part in Edifix's ability to identify and correct journal titles in your references. Over the past couple of months, our team has added over five thousand new titles! These additions should greatly improve the results of your Edifixed journal references.

As always, if Edifix warns you that a journal title is not found in our database, please send us that title! We will validate it and add it to our database. Our reference processing tools are constantly improving with help from users like you!