Thursday, November 15, 2018

Bringing more #science to @Wikidata

Slowly but surely more scientific papers and their authors find their way into Wikidata. Particularly when scientists have staked their claims in ORCiD, adding is easy and obvious.

It is easy because in ORCiD every author, paper, organisation et al have their own unique identifiers. So when you add a paper, all authors who claimed to be author are already linked.

Earlier today, I added papers and co-authors for Jaume Piera. As a consequence Laura Recasens was added today and as you can see in the illustration of her co-authors, several new authors popped up as a consequence.

To do this I use a combination of tools. Reasonator is my preferred tool to display data; for scientists it tells me if he or she is known to be an author. When there are, Scholia presents the scholarly author information. Of particular relevance to me is the co-author presentation. For co-authors shown in white, no gender is given in Wikidata and when the name is an initial and a surname, I will look up the ORCiD information to find a full name. Typically that is how people are known in ORCiD.

I use the SourceMD tool for two purposes; "creating and amending papers for authors" and to "add metadata from ORCiD authors to Wikidata". It is processed in a batch job, I run one job for up to 15 authors at a time and it takes forever to run.

Other people run other jobs, a particular hat tip to Daniel Mietchen who makes sure that recent publications find their way into Wikidata and finds many other reasons to improve on what we have. All this would not be possible without the many tools by Magnus and for Scholia I do thank Finn Årup Nielsen thanks to this evolving presentation, science as a process comes alive.

There is more to do; the Wikipedia citation are in a separate database and much of its data may be found in Wikidata.. Who will merge them. Publications do cite other publications, it is a field I am not really interested in.. They are added so there must be a tool.

When you are interested in a particular scientist, a particular paper.. Just use the tools and slowly but surely we all make Wikidata a great tool to represent science fact.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Saturday, November 10, 2018

More #impact for your #science is in being a #source at @wikipedia

In a study about how students research a new subject it was found that they read the Wikipedia article first. Then they move to its sources and from there it takes off.

In order to have an impact you, as a scientist, wants to be their first getting the attention of your work. There are a few tips.
  • Make sure that you and your work are known. First make your work known at ORCiD. From there it gets into Wikidata
  • PS check out the Scholia presentation of you and your scientific work.. (example)
  • Make sure that your work can be read. Wikipedia actively seeks free reads using the OAbot.
  • Do not think that current practices of your field will benefit new scientists in the future. Many fields are not well represented at ORCiD
For your information. There is a database with the sources used in Wikipedia. The only thing lacking is that this database still needs to be integrated in Wikidata for it to gain a real impact.
Thanks,
      GerardM