OFFZIB – Open Citation Data for Educational Research

Project Description

Citations are an important element of science communication, as they show relationships between scientific publications, research data and their authors. Publications do not stand alone, but are interconnected: They draw on previous knowledge (references) and are cited by the expert community (citations). Citation data therefore serve researchers as a tool for finding relevant literature. In addition, reference and citation data are used as metric indicators in bibliometrics, scientometrics and scientific research. They are used, for example, to investigate the networking of authors, the output of a discipline or the impact of publications, authors and research topics.

Challenges

Literature from the social sciences and the humanities is not adequately represented in commercial citation databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus. In addition to the limited visibility and difficult search for literature, this leads to distorted results when evaluating research output based on publications and citations. In addition, citation data from these services is not openly available and therefore cannot be reused.

The OFFZIB project addresses these challenges and creates open citation data in educational research, which will be made freely available and linked to literature references as part of the central literature reference database FIS Bildung. This open citation data will thus contribute to improved literature search and at the same time be usable for a more comprehensive bibliometric monitoring of internal scientific communication in educational research. The integration into FIS Bildung takes into account the collaborative production process of the literature reference database with its 30 partners. To make scientific literature available across disciplinary and infrastructural boundaries, the citation database is to be integrated into the Open Citations Initiative.

Project Objectives

The extraction tool EXCITE, which has been tested in the social sciences by GESIS, will be trained on publications from the open access repository peDOCS (~ 26,000 publications), integrated in German Education Index (FIS Bildung), to ensure the most complete and error-free extraction of citations possible (Objective 1).

The extraction tool will be integrated into the system environment of the German Education Portal to extract and provide citation data for future publications (Objective 2).

For a sustainable and transparent development of a transdisciplinary and transnational citation database, the data will be integrated into the large open citation database of the Open Citations Initiative (Objective 3).

Project Management

• Dr. Tamara Heck
• Dr. Christoph Schindler

Project Team

• Thomas Oerder
• Verena Weimer

Project Details