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Hypermedia Online Publishing: the Transformation of the Scholarly Journal

6.2.4 Hypertext articles

The addition of hypertext technologies to e-journals provides a significant improvement in the features provided and the useability of the journal. The journal can now provide linkages

within articles (i.e. footnotes)
between articles on same server (i.e. tables of contents)
between articles on different servers (i.e citations)
to other document types (i.e video, audio, etc.)

This was very hard to do before the advent of the Web, but is trivially easy to do now. Because the hypertext functionality is only available on the screen, such articles should be designed to be read on the screen. In particular, they should take into account its landscape orientation, rather than the portrait orientation of paper pages. Hypertext linking allows an e-journal to have a rich set of links within, between and out of articles.

Such links might include navigation links:

a table of contents for the journal issue
a table of contents for each article
links to enlarged versions of figures from thumbnails

They might also include citation links:

external links to cited articles (backward references)
external links to articles which cite this article (forward references).

This latter feature needs to be deliberately added because the architecture of the Web does not directly support bidirectional link traversal. The addition of forward references dramatically increases the usefulness of the article and situates it in a web of scholarship.

PDF now supports hyperlinks internal to a document and external hyperlinks to other PDF files. It also supports links to Web documents through the Weblink plugin.

Examples of these linking mechanisms will be provided when discussing the exemplar e-journals (see 6.3: Leading-edge examples on page 95).

Last modified: Monday, 11-Dec-2017 14:40:36 AEDT