A global citation index for the arts & humanities

VISION 

The Scholar Index is global citation index for all scholarly publications in the arts & humanities. It harnesses the collaborative efforts of a consortium of publishers, research libraries and other heritage institutions, contributing digital publication data. It is distributed, since all corpora will be processed and stored within rightful institutional premises. It is open, as all extracted citation data will be made publicly available as linked data and via the Scholar Index platform.

HOW IT WORKS

HOW IT WORKS

The Scholar Index federates citation data from a variety of publication corpora, held and digitised by partner institutions. To this end, every partner feeds digital or digitised publications to an institutional digital library, the Scholar Library. The library exposes machine learning methods to recognise publication texts, parse them in search for references, and extract citations. The citation data from all partners is then federated into a unique citation index, exposed to the public via the Scholar Index portal and dedicated APIs.

National and international library catalogues are collaboratively maintained and updated, every library part of the system taking responsibility for their activity in the catalog. Similarly, the Scholar Index leverages on the expertise and specialised collections of its consortium partners. Each partner takes responsibility for a certain area of research or set of publications, digitised them and curates the automatically extracted citations. A daunting volume of work will thus be divided into more manageable chunks, distributed among several players.

The expansion of digital informational ecosystems promises to greatly impact the work of humanists. Citation indexing the scholarly literature in the arts & humanities has the added benefit of interlinking currently isolated collections from libraries, archives, museums. By providing for more rapid and exhaustive access to primary and secondary sources, citation indexing will make information retrieval a richer experience.