Andy Hong already has a page for his 2009 undergraduate dissertation, titled “FireCite: A Browser Extension for Citation Recognition and Management” (2009). Not yet online, it seems, but there’s an abstract…

“This dissertation describes FireCite, a Mozilla Firefox extension that incorporates a citation parser and citation recognition. The citation parser is fast, lightweight, and can parse citations from HTML web pages with an overall F-measure of 0.878. Yet it can also parse plain-text citations with an overall F-measure of 0.97, comparable to larger and more complex parsers. The citation recognizer is also fast and lightweight with a high recall of 96%. FireCite proves that it is possible to perform citation recognition and parsing with real-time response and satisfactory accuracy. FireCite itself is able to recognise citations from any web page and extract basic metadata from them.”

Minutes of the development process + background papers | Latest version (0.501 with source code, 7th June 2009 — adds .ac to automatically processed domains)…

“As you surf, this extension detects citations on the webpage. You then have the option to save the information to a reading list, along with any attached PDF file.”

It seems to get confused (reads too many non-citations as if they were citations) on some types of pages, and it’s very basic. But it’s an interesting proof-of-concept for automatic finding/reading of citations on Web pages that are “in the wild” — compared to the popular Firefox addon Zotero which needs to find a “Zotero-friendly” website such as Google Scholar or Amazon in order to do something similar.