University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

![Wiki
hit](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-2XKxeJSfGWs/VxDbza83jvI/AAAAAAAAELQ/sFxDproH84E/wiki_hit.png?imgmax=1600 "wiki_hit.png"){border="0"
width="64" height="64" style="float:right;"}For anyone doing research or
involved in scientific infrastructure, demonstrating the \"impact\" of
those activities is becoming increasingly important. This has fostered a
growth industry in \"alt metrics\", tools to track how research gathers
attention outside academia (of course, we can argue whether attention is
the same as impact).

For an organisation such as [GBIF](http://www.gbif.org) there\'s a clear
need to show that it has impact on the field of biodiversity (and
beyond), especially to its funders (which are ultimately national
governments). To do this GBIF needs to track how its data is used by the
research communities, both to do science and to inform policy. This is
hard to do, especially if there\'s a limited culture of data citation.
It occurs to me that another way to tackle this problem is to invert it
by looking not at the impact of GBIF, but at GBIF as a source of impact.

For a moment let\'s replace GBIF with Wikipedia. We can ask \"what is
the impact of Wikipedia on the research community?\" For example,
Wikipedia is the [8th largest referrer of
DOIs](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/01/introducing-chronograph.html),
which means that Wikipedia is a major source traffic to academic
publishing sites. All those Wikipedia pages which cite the primary
literature are driving traffic to those articles.

Conversely, if we regard Wikipedia as important we can use citations of
articles in Wikipedia pages as a measure of a researcher\'s impact. For
example, according to [Impact
story](https://impactstory.org/u/0000-0002-7101-9767) I am
\"Wikitastic\" as 11 Wikipedia pages cite articles that I am an author
of (authorship is discovered by using my ORCID
[0000-0002-7101-9767](http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7101-9767)).

Likewise, [altmetric](http://altmetric.com) tracks citations on
Wikipedia, so that a paper like the one below may have minimal social
media impact but as the gray donut rings signifying that it\'s been
cited on Wikipedia.

> JENKINS, P. D., & ROBINSON, M. F. (2002, June). Another variation on
> the gymnure theme: description of a new species of Hylomys
> (Lipotyphla, Erinaceidae, Galericinae). Bulletin of The Natural
> History Museum. Zoology Series. Cambridge University Press (CUP)
> [doi:10.1017/S0968047002000018](http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0968047002000018){target="_new"}
>
> ::: {.altmetric-embed badge-type="donut" doi="10.1017/S0968047002000018"}
> :::

Hence, we can look at Wikipedia in two different ways. The first is to
ask \"what is the impact of Wikipedia?\", the second is to assume that
Wikipedia has impact, and then use that as one measure of the impact of
researchers (how \"Wikitastic\" you are).

So, let\'s go back to GBIF. Imagine we leave aside the question of
whether GBIF has impact and imagine that we can use GBIF as a measure of
impact (\"GBIFtastic\", sorry, that was unforgivable).

### Example 1: From DOI to FundRef to GBIF

In a previous post I discussed the [lack of mosquito data in GBIF and
how I plugged this gap by using open data cite by a paper in
eLife](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-zika-virus-gbif-and-missing.html).
This paper has the DOI **10.7554/elife.08347** and if I plug that into
[CrossRef\'s search
engine](http://search.crossref.org/?q=10.7554%2Felife.08347) I can get
back some information on the funders of that paper:

> Research funded by Sir Richard Southwood Graduate Scholarship \|
> Rhodes Scholarships \| National Institutes of Health (RAPIDD program,
> R01-AI069341, R01-AI091980, R01-GM08322, N01-A1-25489) \| Wellcome
> Trust (#095066, Vecnet, \#099872) \| National Aeronautics and Space
> Administration (#NNX15AF36G) \| Biotechnology and Biological Sciences
> Research Council \| Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (#OPP1053338,
> \#OPP52250) \| Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes \|
> Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (#21803) \| European
> Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC/09/018)

Now, this gives me a connection between funding agencies, a paper they
funded, and the data in GBIF. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation
([doi:10.13039/100000865](http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000865)) funded
[doi:10.7554/elife.08347](http://doi.org/10.7554/elife.08347) which
generated data in GBIF
[doi:10.15468/7apj8n](http://doi.org/10.15468/7apj8n).

I suspect that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation don\'t know that
they\'ve funded data gathering that has ended up in GBIF, but I suspect
they\'d be interested. Especially if that could be quantified (een
better if we can demonstrate reuse). The process of linking funders to
data can be largely automated, especially as more and more papers are
now automatically linked to funder information. The link between
publications and data in GBIF can be harder to establish, but at least
one publisher (Pensoft) has establish a direct feed from publication to
GBIF.

So, what if GBIF could computationally discover the funders of the data
it holds, and could then communicate that to the funders. I think
there\'s scope here for funders to take an interest in GBIF and it\'s
role in expanding the reuse (and hence impact) of data that funders have
paid for. Demonstrating to governments that national funding agencies
are supporting research that generates data that ends up in GBIF may
help make the case that GBIF is worth supporting.

### Example 2: GBIF as altmetric source

The little altmetric donuts that we see on papers require sources of
data, such as Twitter, Wikipedia, blogs, etc. For example, the Plant
List dataset I recently put into GBIF has a DOI
([doi:10.15468/btkum2](http://dx.doi.org/10.15468/btkum2))and this has
received some attention so it has a altimetric donut (wouldn\'t it be
nice if GBIF showed these on dataset pages?):

::: {.altmetric-embed badge-type="donut" doi="10.15468/btkum2"}
:::

What if GBIF itself became a source that altimetric scanned when
measuring impact? What if having your papers mentioned in GBIF (for
example, as a source of distributional data or a taxonomic name)
contributed to the visible impact of that work. Wouldn\'t that encourage
people to mobilise their data? Wouldn\'t that help people discover the
wider conversation about the data and associated publications? Wouldn\'t
that help generate more impact for papers that might otherwise gather
less attention?

### Summary

I realise that I\'ve somewhat avoided the question of the impact of GBIF
itself, which is something that also needs to be tackled (and this is
one reason why GBIF assigns DOIs to datasets and downloads to support
data citation), but I think that may be only a part of the bigger
picture. If we assume GBIF is impactful to start with, then I think we
can start to think how GBIF can help persuade researchers and funders
that contributing to GBIF is a good thing.


For anyone doing research or involved in scientific infrastructure, demonstrating the "impact" of those activities is becoming increasingly important.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

GBIF and impact: CrossRef, FundRef, and Altmetric