ScientoMiner ICR - moduł importu danych bibliograficznych z zasobów Crossref dla platformy Gephi

Abstract

Purpose/Thesis: Presenting what causes problems in reliable bibliometric research using citation network analysis, the author indicates that the growing use of the DOI identification system and the growing phenomenon of publishing information on article citations by individual publishers result in new possibilities for such research. Particularly noteworthy here are Crossref services that enable downloading structured bibliographic information (including citations) for all interested parties. The author proposes the extension of the Gephi analytical platform with a data import plug-in that imports data describing citations from Crossref services, thus facilitating citation analysis by all interested parties in this source of data. Approach/Methods: The implementation of the proposed plug-in required the analysis of the information architecture of resources collected and indexed in the Crossref database and the way they are shared as web services. One of the important parts of the research was also the development of a graph data model that allows unambiguous identification of citing and cited papers and the relations between them, so that the evolution of this model in the future (e.g. adding co-authorship relations) would not prevent the usage of the developed plug-in. Results and conclusions: The developed functionality allows to import a directed citation graph from Crossref resources to the Gephi platform, for user-defined journals identified by the ISSN, with the possibility of limiting the data set to given time intervals. For less experienced users, it also offers preliminary coloring of the graph’s vertices by their type. The use of DOI identifiers makes the results of the analyzes more reliable than in the case of analyses where matching of titles and authors of bibliographic units with records of references section is performed. Originality/Value: The Gephi computing platform, being an interesting tool for analyzing network structures, is also used, mainly by foreign researchers, to implement bibliometric research and visualize their results. Recently, there has been a growing interest in this tool among local researchers, but it seems that it is still losing competition with the easier to use Pajek application and strictly dedicated to the bibliometric analysis VOSviewer platform. Although the latter tools have less analytical capabilities, the technical barriers in loading the Gephi platform with bibliographic data limits its usage. The author, using the modular construction of this platform, has developed a plug-in enabling automatic data import directly from the Crossref resources in a more friendly way compared to the VOSviewer environment. To the best of her knowledge, it is also the first extension of this platform dedicated to the support of strictly bibliometric research.