New NIH Resource to Analyze Biomedical Research Citations: The Open Citation Collection

Citations from scientific articles are more than lines on a page. They can, when reading between those lines, shed some light on the development of scientific thought and on the progress of biomedical technology.  We’ve previously posted some examples in blogs here, here, and here. But to better see the light, we all would benefit from more comprehensive data and easier access to them. My colleagues within the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis sought to answer this call. Drs. Ian Hutchins and George Santangelo embarked on a hefty bibliometric endeavor over the past several years to curate biomedical citation data. They aggregated over 420 million citation links from sources like Medline, PubMed Central, Entrez, CrossRef, and other unrestricted, open-access datasets. With this information in hand, we can now take a better glimpse into relationships between basic  and applied research, into how a researchers’ works are cited, and into ways to make large-scale analyses of citation metrics easier and free. As described in their recent PLOS Biology essay, the resulting resource, called the NIH Open Citation Collection (OCC), is now freely available and ready for the biomedical and behavioral research communities to use. You can access, visualize, and bulk download OCC data as part of the NIH’s webtool called iCite (Figure 1). iCite allows users to access bibliometric tools, look at productivity of research, and see how often references are cited.  Figure ...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike citations iCite OCC Open Citation Collection relative citation ratio Source Type: funding