Open Citations in German Educational Research–Identifying Disciplinary Practices to Train Data Extraction

Abstract:  Citations are an important element of scientific communication, as they transparently show relationships between scientific publications, research data and their authors within the scientific community. Citation data is used in bibliometric and scientometric studies as evidence of internal scientific communication for the selfreflection of a discipline, for the evaluation and control of research performance and for research management (van Raan, 2019; Ball, 2020). In the past, the collection, processing and provision of scientific citation data was in the hands of a few commercial providers, such as Clarivate (Web of Science) and Elsevier (Scopus). Their use is based on licenses, which results in two major problems: Firstly, the commercial citation databases are subject to a fee and are not openly accessible. Secondly, those citation databases do not cover all disciplines to the same extent. As a result, these citation databases are only suitable for searching for literature and evaluating research to a very limited extent. This applies above all to the social sciences and humanities, which include almost all disciplines doing research about education, such as educational research, psychology, economics, and sociology (Moed, 2005; Singleton et al., 2015). Studies also show that reference lists in those databases are missing or are insufficient (Martín-Martín et al., 2018; Visser, van Eck, Waltman, 2021; Chi, 2014). In summary, educational research lacks exhaustive and high-quality citation data to improve literature search and disciplinary bibliometric studies. Current research projects and network activities aim to contribute to open and networked citation data in science (Backes et al., 2024). Two examples of such approaches are the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and OpenAlex. Our project Open Citation Data for Educational Research (OFFZIB) aligns with those initiatives and aims to extract citation data from open access publications in educational research and make them available via the central national German Education Index (FIS Bildung) (Botte, 2017). This meets the need for a more optimized literature search in the form of a semantic research graph in the database (Hocker et al., 2019) and at the same time offers the possibility of more detailed citation analyses in educational research. To reach this goal, we need to adapt an extraction algorithm to best perform with educational literature data and to establish new workflows to maintain the provision of the extracted data when the project has ended. To develop this extraction algorithm, knowledge must first be gained about how German education researchers cite, specifically in-text citations (Burbules, 2014). The specific research question is: Which citation styles (including special cases) exist in German educational research and are and there sub-disciplinary and document typebased differences?