RefConcile - Automated Online Reconciliation of Bibliographic References

Comprehensive bibliographies often rely on community contributions. In such settings, de-duplication is mandatory for the bibliography to be useful. Ideally, de-duplication works online, i.e., when adding new references, so the bibliography remains duplicate-free at all times. While de-duplication is well researched, generic approaches do not achieve the result quality required for automated reconciliation. To overcome this problem, we propose a new duplicate detection and reconciliation technique called RefConcile. Aiming specifically at bibliographic references, it uses dedicated blocking and matching techniques tailored to this type of data. Our evaluation based on a large real-world collection of bibliographic references shows that RefConcile scales well, and that it detects and reconciles duplicates highly accurately.