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Is there a tool that can give me some data on the bibliography with regard to the paper it's attached to? I mean, something that can tell me which reference is referred to most often throughout the text, what author is referred to most often, stuff like that.

With short papers and those that use a number-based referencing system, I can do it myself by counting (possibly using Excel). But it's far from ideal.

How do you analyse a paper's bibliography with regard to the text?

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  • I think people have considered weighted citation metrics taking this into account, though I don't know any specific ones in use.
    – Kimball
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 13:52
  • FYI if you get (La)TeX sources, say on arXiv, then searcing the source file is probably more accurate than trying to process the pdf, though may not be 100% accurate.
    – Kimball
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 13:53

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It depends on what exactly you need, but a good starting point is to use the DOI of your paper and access the API of CrossRef. You will then see the metadata attached to that paper. Most publishers also provide so-called 'open citations' with these metadata.

Here is one example: https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102386

(Note: This is a machine-readable JSON-format; if you only see messy stuff, use a "JSON Beautifier" - either as a browser extension, or you can simply copy the whole JSON text into an online JSON formatter.)

Go to the "reference"-tag. You will see a list of references there. Here is a screenshot of the first three references (the first is from the journal Business History Review, the third is from the journal Critical Inquiry, etc.):

enter image description here

If the references carry DOIs, you can use these DOI to again access the CrossRef API and find out, say, the authors' ORCID (and their names, date of publication, journal names etc). That way, you could calculate which authors are cited most often in a text, or even in a larger corpus of thousands of papers.

Regarding your possible use-case of "which reference is referred to most often throughout the text" - - this seems a bit tricky, as you will need to computationally access the full texts. Well, there are indeed large corpora of full-texts of Open Access papers, which might be helpful for you. But anyway, whatever the actual detail you wish to achieve, the CrossRef API and its open scholarly metadata (open citations) is always a good starting point.

Make sure to read the CrossRef REST API Documentation. For more information on open citations, I suggest the I4OC.

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