It turns out that many users have great difficulties to correctly set up the citation assistant. This obviously is due to the many installation requirements and external dependencies of the assistant.

We should create a test suite with some standardized citations that we can use to better localize configuration errors remotely. The test suite should check for:

1) The presence of PHP 5.0 or later
2) All required PHP modules, especially xml/xsl and curl
3) Important PHP settings, especially those related to executing external shell programs and connecting to external web services
4) For each citation extraction/database service: a test citation with expected results.
5) For services that have local installation requirements (currently only ParaCite): test that those requirements are present.
6) Dump all results and filter citation service configurations to a text file for the users to post on the forum
7) Run a test with lots of citations and check the processing table after that for dead processes.