Analysis and news
Turning scholarly research content inside-out Neil Blair Christensen discusses the evolution of enriched scholarly research
While organising some thoughts for this piece, I asked the question below to Josh Nicholson, the CEO and co-founder at Scite, which provides smart citations to check how a scientific article has been cited, and if its findings have been supported or contrasted by others. To date, Scite has extracted more than 900 million citation statements from over 25 million full-text articles. Neil: ‘Hi Josh, Do you think of Scite in
terms of PID [persistent identifiers]? I’m writing a brief piece about enrichment and I’m thinking of different angles. One of the angles is around PIDs that people may think of in simplistic and traditional terms, but I wonder if tools like Scite are a more applied/smarter generation of PIDs that generate outcomes, and not just long-lasting references between objects. People may tend to think of PIDs as ORCID, ROR, GRID, DOI, and so on. ‘Is Scite actually a dynamic next-
generation PID that takes it further by not just establishing the links, but by assessing and interpreting the context of the links in the process?’ Josh: ‘Hi Neil, I generally don’t think of
Scite as a PID because I also associate PIDs as more simplistic and traditional. With that said, I think the argument could be made that Scite is a PID. I generally introduce our work by saying we are introducing the next generation of citations, which are PIDs, right?’ (NB Christensen, J Nicholson, Personal communication, 28 June) Some readers may rightfully challenge
my casual interpretation of PIDs, but let’s try to use my question as a jumping-off point for how we may think about objects that cite and link objects for particular criteria; how the sophistication of linked
10 Research Information August/September 2021
“Are PIDs the beginnings of what one could think of as ‘inside-out’ skeletons for more transparently assessing and certifying?”
objects evolve; how we make use of them, and where they originate. Some of us may tend to think
traditionally of enriching objects or PIDs as fairly rudimentary infrastructural add- ons, but what if we expand the framework? Are they the beginnings of what one could think of as ‘inside-out’ skeletons for more transparently assessing, certifying and linking-required aspects within research studies? What if tomorrow’s reproducibility,
recognition and linking standards require transparent and open inside- out constructs of research content to validate the value of research studies, similar to Scite but for many more aspects? Whatever we use and design today has implications for tomorrow’s workflows, and more ‘inside-out’ dynamics may be brewing than we recognise in traditional PID and content enrichment conversations. Let’s look at some examples. Scite has
partnered across the scholarly research industry over the past couple of years, and recently also partnered with Research Square Company to provide smart citation badges for nearly 100,000 preprints on
Research Square’s preprint server that again are the results of hundreds of linked journal partnerships. Other types of badges already available on the same preprint server include Prescreen, Methods Reporting, Data Reporting and third party Dimensions badges. Additional third party SciScore and Ripeta badges have also been piloted on the server, and behind the scenes, American Journal Experts offers language quality assessment badges to help authors optimise their writing before sharing preprints. Elsewhere, one can think of the emergence of Open Science badges, DataSeer, Altmetrics, the framework for MDAR (Materials Design Analysis Reporting), or capsules like Code Ocean, Jupyter Notebooks and R Markdown. In other areas, consider F1000 Research
or eLife’s ‘publish, then review’ models, the CRediT taxonomy, RAiD, or Rescognito’s recognition ledger as additional signs of inside-out constructs. They are positioned as value-adding components that offer a diversity of ways to link, identify, certify, optimise or reproduce critical aspects of the research endeavour. But rather than foreign objects that are tagged onto research objects, they turn the studies inside-out, increase utility and make it more immediately apparent what the studies offer in strength, limitations and reproducibility. This direction may also relate to what
Malcolm MacLeod coins in his ‘Publomics’ approach for systematically combining and integrating more granularity of research claims and provenance to facilitate more effective ‘research on research’ as an answer to the replication crisis. So much information is being
@researchinfo |
www.researchinformation.info
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
