Library Guides: Open Citation Databases: home

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"Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.

As the number of scholarly publications is estimated to double every nine years, citations – and the computational systems that track them – enable researchers and the public to keep abreast of significant developments in any given field. For this to be possible, it is essential to have unrestricted access to bibliographic and citation data in machine-readable form."

Initiative for Open Citations I4OC,. (n.d.). Initiative for Open Citations: Goals. I4OC. https://i4oc.org/#goals

Citation data has largely been a propriety resource, with libraries spending tens of thousands of dollars to acquire research databases to provide access to scholarly work. However, this model is changing, and under the larger auspices of the open science movement, there is a call for bibliographic references to be freely available. Below are some interesting and cutting edge open citation databases. These open platforms not only provide access to scholarly publications but allow for visualization of the research within citation networks etc.

Publish or Perish
Publish or Perish is designed to empower individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. The software retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses a variety of data sources (incl. Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search) to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes citations to reveal a variety of citation metrics.
Crossref
CrossRef is nonprofit membership organization for scholarly publishing working to make content easy to find, cite, link, and assess. This organization assigns Digital Object Identifies (DOI) which allows persistent cross-linking between publishers and content providers. You can search the database of citations.
Dimensions
The free version of Dimensions provides openly-available search and metrics for more than 100 million publications. Search across multiple content types, ranging from publications to grants, clinical trials, patents, datasets, and policy documents.
iCite
iCite, calculates bibliometric values for user-selected articles listed in PubMed. iCite displays the number of articles, articles per year, citations per year, and Relative Citation Ratio (a field-normalized metric that shows the citation impact of one or more articles relative to the average NIH-funded paper). Created by the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA)
Lens.org
Open citation platform that hosts over 120 million patent documents linked to a scholarly citation database of over 220 million scholarly works, technical literature, regulatory documents, and business data. Lens serves over 200 million scholarly records, compiled and harmonized from Microsoft Academic, PubMed and Crossref, enhanced with UnPaywall open access information, CORE full text, and links to ORCID.
Internet Archive Scholar
"This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web."
Microsoft Academic
Microsoft Academic (MA) employs advances in machine learning, semantic inference, and knowledge discovery to help you explore scholarly information in more powerful ways than ever before. Search journals, institutional repositories, patents, book chapters, and conferences.
OpenAIRE
OpenAIRE supports and creates the social and technical bridges enabling Open Science in Europe and beyond. Specifically, its technical services (i) collect citation metadata about OA and non-OA literature, research data, software, organizations, funders, grants, and research communities, (ii) interlink these entities with semantic relationships to maintain an openly shared information graph in support of open science and research impact monitoring.
Scinapse
Citation database containing citations aggregated from Microsoft Research, Semantic Scholar, Springer Nature, and PubMed.
Scite
Scite is a open citation platform that allows you to see how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the snippet of the citation and a classification describing whether the citation provides supporting or disputing evidence for the cited claim. Claim your papers to see if your research is supported or disputed.
Semantic Scholar
A Free, AI-powered Tool for Navigating the Scientific Literature. 180 Million+ Papers. Creating an account enables you to create email alerts for new papers, create a library for papers you'd like to revisit, as well as claim an author page so you can better manage your author details and papers. Author metric scores are avaialble.
VOSviewer
"VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. These networks may for instance include journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. VOSviewer also offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature."

Open Citation Databases: home

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Read more about the Open Science / Open Citation Movement