Repository containing code and data for our "Can we assess research using open scientific knowledge graphs? A case study within the Italian National Scientific Qualification" paper.
The need for open scientific knowledge graphs is ever increasing. While there are large repositories of open access articles and free publication indexes, there are still a few examples of free knowledge graphs exposing citation networks, and often their coverage is partial. One of the results is that most of the evaluation processes based on citation counts rely on traditional commercial citation databases. Things are changing under the pressure of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC, https://i4oc.org) and the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA, https://i4oa.org), whose goal is to campaign for scholarly publishers to open the reference lists and the other metadata (e.g. the abstracts) of their articles. This paper investigates the growth of the open bibliographic metadata and open citations available in two scientific knowledge graphs, i.e. OpenCitations’ COCI and Crossref, with an experiment on the Italian National Scientific Qualification (NSQ), the National process for University Professor qualification which instead uses data from commercial indexes. We simulated the procedure by only using such open data and explored similarities and differences with the official results. The outcomes of the experiment show that the amount of open bibliographic metadata and open citation data currently available in the two scientific knowledge graphs adopted is not yet enough for obtaining results similar to those provided using commercial citation databases.