The benefit in online content of a bibliographic reference is having it link directly to the resource. Journal articles typically have DOIs[5], and a reference to a journal article might include the DOI. This can easily be parsed into a link which will be resolved to the URL at which the referenced article can be found. Many journal articles (and references to them) also include PubMed[9] IDs, which work in a similar way.

Sometimes the best that can be done with a bibliographic reference is to pass the components to a search tool, as parameters to a URL.

The components of a reference must be identified in the XML in order to generate accurate search URLs.