From September 3-5, the Workshop on Open Citations was held in Bologna: researchers, scholarly publishers, funders, policy makers, and advocates for open citations gathered to present new tools and practices for the creation, management, and reuse of citation data, and to participate in a hackathon.
Though none of us at RDS was able to head to Italy for this workshop, we’ve been exploring the tools that were presented, thanks to the slides and posters being made available directly on the workshop’s website. Here are some tools that we think are especially interesting and useful:
- Citation Gecko is an open-source web application that enhances researchers’ discovery of what is being published in their field. To use Citation Gecko, you first select ‘seed papers’ that help to define their interest area. These can be selected in a variety of ways: you can import papers from Zotero, Mendeley, and BibTex, or you can search for papers by keyword or DOI. The application runs queries across several databases in order to find other papers that would be relevant. These papers are listed in a sidebar, and are visualized with a network graph to illustrate how closely they may be related to the seed papers. You can then add any of the newly found papers to their collection of seed papers. Citation Gecko also allows you to perform searches of papers that are cited in their seed papers as well as papers that cite any of their seed papers. See the poster about Citation Gecko.
- ScienceOpen is a database of research publications that also serves as a professional social platform. From ScienceOpen’s website: “Data available on research articles are analyzed, and our analysis links articles via authors, citations, keywords, journals, and more.” The social component of the platform comes in with researchers being able to annotate articles with comments or post-publication peer reviews. ScienceOpen is about five years old, and the group developing the platform is always looking for input and recommendations on how they can continue to enhance open scholarly communication. See the slides about ScienceOpen.
- Scholar Index is a platform that hosts the Scholar Index and the Scholar Library, serving researchers in the arts and humanities. People involved in publishing, research libraries, and cultural heritage institutions around the world contribute digital publication data and digitized scholarly literature to build the corpora that the platform gives researchers access to. The Scholar Library is a digital library where partner institutions can load digital scholarly literature, and the Scholar Index is a global citation index; with the partners being from publishing, research libraries, and other cultural heritage institutions, the Scholar Index is able to link resources from libraries, archives, and museums to create an enriched searching experience for arts and humanities researchers. See the abstract and slides for the presentation on Scholar Index.
The tools above are just a sampling of what was presented–we encourage you to explore what else was presented on bibliometrics and the benefits of sharing that data at the Workshop on Open Citations!