This paper describes a prototype system, CABRef, which provides seamless linking from a citation in the bibliography of an electronic journal article to a detailed abstract of the cited work, within a particular research domain. Publishers of journal articles will query CABRef to determine the URL links to embed in their article bibliographies which enable end-user cross-reference navigation. The abstracts within CABRef, and their discovery metadata, are encoded in XML and processed with X.M.L-aware software. The CABRef XML abstracts database is updated using data exported from the CABI abstracts production database on a regular basis when abstracts are 'published', involving a simple extra step in the CABI abstracts production process.