Scholia for Software

Abstract:  Scholia for Software is a project to add software profiling features to Scholia, which is a scholarly profiling service from the Wikimedia ecosystem and integrated with Wikipedia and Wikidata. This document is an adaptation of the funded grant proposal. We are sharing it for several reasons, including research transparency, our wish to encourage the sharing of research proposals for reuse and remixing in general, to assist others specifically in making proposals that would complement our activities, and because sharing this proposal helps us to tell the story of the project to community stakeholders.

A “scholarly profiling service” is a tool which assists the user in accessing data on some aspect of scholarship, usually in relation to research. Typical features of such services include returning the biography of academic publications for any given researcher, or providing a list of publications by topic. Scholia already exists as a Wikimedia platform tool built upon Wikidata and capable of serving these functions. This project will additionally add software-related data to Wikidata, develop Scholia’s own code, and address some ethical issues in diversity and representation around these activities. The end result will be that Scholia will have the ability to report what software a given researcher has described using in their publications, what software is most used among authors publishing on a given topic or in a given journal, what papers describe projects which use some given software, and what software is most often co-used in projects which use a given software.

 

 

Visualizing the research ecosystem via Wikidata and Scholia | Zenodo

“Research takes place in a sociotechnical ecosystem that connects researchers with the objects of study and the natural and cultural worlds around them.

Wikidata is a community-curated open knowledge base in which concepts covered in any Wikipedia — and beyond — can be described and annotated collaboratively.

This session is devoted to demoing Scholia, an open-source tool to visualize the global research ecosystem based on information in Wikidata about research fields, researchers, institutions, funders, databases, locations, publications, methodologies and related concepts….”

Robustifying Scholia: paving the way for knowledge discovery and research assessment through Wikidata

Abstract:  Knowledge workers like researchers, students, journalists, research evaluators or funders need tools to explore what is known, how it was discovered, who made which contributions, and where the scholarly record has gaps. Existing tools and services of this kind are not available as Linked Open Data, but Wikidata is. It has the technology, active contributor base, and content to build a large-scale knowledge graph for scholarship, also known as WikiCite. Scholia visualizes this graph in an exploratory interface with profiles and links to the literature. However, it is just a working prototype. This project aims to “robustify Scholia” with back-end development and testing based on pilot corpora. The main objective at this stage is to attain stability in challenging cases such as server throttling and handling of large or incomplete datasets. Further goals include integrating Scholia with data curation and manuscript writing workflows, serving more languages, generating usage stats, and documentation.