pdfextract VS grobid

- An alternative is pdfextract by Crossref. They probably use this to build their own large database. It also works really well and gives you some JSON that would probably need less postprocessing than Grobid. I didn't use it for some minor technical reason that I forgot.

Interesting concept. Grobid tries to do the same https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid

I would suggest using grobid - a pipeline for extracting scientific PDFs into a common XML format which can be easily parsed. Grobid has quite a nice mature REST API that I've used in some of my own projects. It parses references and matches them to their DOI using the CrossRef API with a reported 95% F1 score. This should make your job pretty simple as far as I can tell - all you'd need to do is run your papers through grobid and then build a citation graph by comparing document DOIs.

Just use science-parse or GROBID. They have been designed for that exact reason.

- I ended up using Grobid, which converts the PDF to a very detailed XML format. The format is not a word processing format though, but a format specifically for representing scientific documents. I don't know, if it would, for example, contain tags about bold or italicized text. The tool is working really well, but since you probably cannot use the output XML format directly, it will need some postprocessing, which would be relatively simple with XML parsing libraries.

A few years ago I evaluated a few open source tools. In the end focused on GROBID. As usual, it depends on the type of document whether it works well for your use-case. There is some focus on it being "fast" (if that is a concern).