kiz,
You are not always comparing two strings. You are mentally tokenizing these strings. Further, you are giving context to them - things in parens at the end do not seem to be important to you. In other words, you have to build a solution that applies the same mental process as yourself to determine if the reference sources are the same. I have built a solution that does this in the past but since I was hired to do it, I can't share the code with you.

There are plenty of tools to build your own but you have to figure out how to glue them together. This is not that simple, so neither can your approach. I used a layered approach. Let me give you some things to consider.

• Number of tokens in strings
• Order of tokens in strings
• Proximity of tokens (Archivio Marini vs Archivio Giuliano Marini vs Archivio Not Very Close At All Marini)
• Remove unimportant tokens (trailing text in parens)
• Normalize tokens
  • Abbreviations
  • Typos
  • Alternative spellings (color and colour)
  • Punctuation
• When using an edit distance on individual tokens, consider the length of the tokens not just the distance

Now consider all the tools in your tool bag and how they may be useful. Here are some examples:

• Text::Soundex or Text::Metaphone to help identify alternative spellings
• Regex::Assemble to help normalize words - especially ones with typos (continuously add to list as new variations are discovered)

I can see you have already searched CPAN and know about things like Text::Compare and Text::PhraseDistance but these seem to be publication references. There are a number of modules on CPAN for citations and bibliography references - you may be able to leverage them as well. It would also be helpful to know more about the overall project because there are some other tools that may be helpful. For instance, do you have a known list of publications and have a list that needs to be identified or do you have one huge bunch and are trying to identify duplicates? The approach I would take is different in both case.

I have a stack full of notes on the topic of text comparison and analysis I have been meaning to write about at length. If you need more help, speak up.

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