Abstract
Dimensions was built as a platform to allow stakeholders in the research community, including academic bibliometricians, to more easily create and understand the context of different types of research object through the linkages between these objects. Links between objects are created via persistent identifiers and machine learning techniques, while additional context is introduced via data enhancements such as per-object categorisations and person and institution disambiguation. While these features make analytical use cases accessible for end users, the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted a different set of needs to analyze trends in scholarship as they occur: Real-time bibliometrics. The combination of full-text search, daily data updates, a broad set of scholarly objects including pre-prints and a wider set of data fields for analysis, broadens opportunities for a different style of analysis. A subset of these emerging capabilities is discussed and three basic analyses are presented as illustrations of the potential for real-time bibliometrics.
Highlights
The COVID-19 crisis has changed the world on a grand scale
We argue that a robust proxy that includes much of the medicine-centric COVID-19 research today can be built by including articles in the following RCDC categories: FIGURE 4 | Research output results from querying with the boxed COVID search definition in Dimensions
Bibliometricians and scientometricians are used to working on substantially longer timescales
Summary
The COVID-19 crisis has changed the world on a grand scale. Its effects have been seen in every country, at every level and in every facet of life from social to professional. It is highly likely that the research landscape has been and will be fundamentally altered both in the short term and the long term as a result of COVID-19. The long-term issues are likely to include: funding for research; expectations regarding the public research sector’s relationship with industry; expectations regarding the role of universities in sustainable development; and the role that institutions of higher education should be playing in retooling and up-skilling the workforce (Frey, 2019; Carden and Young, 2020; Hook, 2020; Hook et al, 2020; Wastl et al, 2020). While it is difficult to predict the future or even to guess the persistent long-term effects of COVID-19 on the research environment, COVID-19 does appear to have played the role of a catalyst and accelerant for change in the short term. We argue that the signal for some of these changes can already be observed in the data that is to be found in scholarly search databases and other modern technology-driven tools that support the research ecosystem
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