COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI references, is the first citation index to be published by OpenCitations, in which we have applied the concept of citations as first-class data entities, introduced in the previous section, to index the contents of one of the major open databases of scholarly citation information, namely Crossref (https://crossref.org), and to render and make available this information in machine-readable RDF under a CC0 waiver. Crossref contains metadata about publications (mainly academic journal articles) that are identified using Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Out of more than 100 million publications recorded in Crossref, Crossref now stores the reference lists of more than 43 million of them deposited by the publishers. Many of these references are to other publications bearing DOIs that are also described in Crossref, while others are to publications that lack DOIs and do not have Crossref descriptions. Crossref organises such publications with associated reference lists according to three categories: closed, limited and open. These categories refer, respectively, to publications for which the reference lists are not visible to anyone outside the Crossref Cited-by membership, are visible only to them and to Crossref Metadata Plus members, or are visible to and open for re-use by all users.Footnote 2
Followed the first release of COCI on June 4, 2018, the most recent version of COCI, released on November 12, 2018, contains more that 445 million DOI-to-DOI citations that are included in the open and the limited datasets of Crossref reference data.Footnote 3 All the citation data in COCI and their provenance information, described according the Graffoo diagram (Falco et al. 2014) presented in Fig. 2, are released under a CC0 waiver, and are compliant with the FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016).
In the following subsections we introduce the ingestion workflow developed for creating COCI, we provides some figures on the citations it contains, and we list the resources and services we have made available to permit access to and querying of the dataset.
Ingestion workflow
We processed all the data included in the October 2018 JSON dump of Crossref data, available to all the Crossref Metadata Plus members. The ingestion workflow, summarised in Fig. 3, was organised in four distinct phases, and all the related scripts developed and used for this purpose are released as open source code according to the ISC License and downloadable from the official GitHub repository of COCI at https://github.com/opencitations/coci.
Phase 1: global data generation We parse and process the entire Crossref bibliographic database to extract all the publications having a DOI and their available list of references. Through this process three datasets are generated, which are used in the next phase:
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Dates, the publication dates of all the bibliographic entities in Crossref and of all their references if they explicitly specify a DOI and a publication date as structured data – e.g. see the fields “DOI” and “year” in the array “reference” in https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1007/978-3-030-00668-6_8. Where the same DOI is encountered multiple times, e.g. as a proper item indexed in Crossref and also as a reference in the reference list of another article deposited in the Crossref, we use the full publication date defined in the indexed item.
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ISSN: the ISSN (if any) and publication type (“journal-article”, “book-chapter”, etc.) of each bibliographic entity identified by a DOI indexed in Crossref.
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ORCID: the ORCIDs (if any) associated with the authors of each bibliographic entity identified by a DOI indexed in Crossref.
Phase 2: CSV generation We generate a CSV file within which each row represents a particular citation between a citing entity and a cited entity according to the data available in the Crossref dump, by looking at the DOI identifying the citing entity and all the DOIs specified in the reference list of such a citing entity according to the Crossref data. In particular, we execute the following four steps for each citation identified:
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We generate the OCI for the citation by encoding the DOIs of the citing and cited entities into numerical sequences using the lookup table available at https://github.com/opencitations/oci/blob/master/lookup.csv, which are prefixed by the supplier prefix “020” to indicate Crossref as the source of the citation.
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We retrieve the publication date of the citing entity from the Dates dataset and assign it as citation creation date.
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We retrieve the publication date of the cited entity (from the Dates dataset) and we use it, together with the publication date of the citing entity retrieved in the previous step, to calculate the citation timespan.
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We use the data contained in the ISSN and ORCID datasets to establish whether the citing and cited entity have been published in the same journal and/or have at least one author in common, and in these cases we assign the appropriate self-citation type(s) to the citation.
Simultaneously with the creation of the CSV file of citation data, we generate a second CSV file containing the provenance information for each citation (identified by its OCI generated in the aforementioned Step 1). These provenance data include the agent responsible for the generation of the citation, the Crossref API call that refers to the data of the citing bibliographic entity containing the reference used to create the citation, and the creation date of the citation.
Phase 3: converting into RDF The CSV files generated in the previous phase are then converted into RDF according to the N-Triples format, following the OWL model introduced in Fig. 2, where the DOIs of the citing and cited entities become DOI URLs starting with “http://dx.doi.org/”,Footnote 4 while the IRI of the citation includes its OCI (without the “oci:” prefix), as illustrated in the example given in the previous section.
Phase 4: updating the triplestore The final RDF files generated in Phase 3 are used to update the triplestore used for the OpenCitations Indexes.
Data
COCI was first created and released on July 4, 2018, and most recently updated on November 12, 2018. Currently, it contains 445,826,118 citations between 46,534,705 bibliographic entities. These are stored by means of 2,259,134,894 RDF statements (around 5 RDF statements per citation) for describing the citation data, and 1,337,478,354 RDF statements (3 statements per citation) for describing the related provenance information. Of the citations stored, 29,755,045 (6.7%) are journal self-citations, while 250,991 (0.06%) are author self-citations. The number of identified author self-citations, based on author ORCIDs, is a significant underestimate of the true number, mainly due to the sparsity of the data concerning the ORCID author identifiers within the Crossref database. Journal entities (i.e. journals, volumes, issues, and articles) are the most common type of bibliographic entity cited, with over 420 million citations.
We also classify the cited documents according to their publishers—Table 2 shows the ten top publishers of citing and cited documents, calculated by looking at the DOI prefixes of the entities involved in each citation. As we can see, Elsevier is by far the publisher having the majority of cited documents. It is also the largest publisher that is not participating in the Initiative for Open Citations by not making its publications’ reference lists open at Crossref—which is highlighted by the very limited amount of outgoing citations recorded in COCI. Its present refusal to open its article reference lists in Crossref, contrary to the practice of most of the major scholarly publishers, is contributing significantly to the invisibility of Elsevier’s own publications within the corpora of open citation data such as COCI that are increasingly being used by the scholarly community for discovery, citation network visualization and bibliometric analysis, as we introduce below in the section entitled Quantifying the use of COCI citation data.
Table 2 A classification of the COCI citations according to the publishers of the cited (“incoming citations”) and citing (“outgoing citations”) documents. The table shows the top ten publishers by the overall amount of incoming and outgoing to/from their published works. Those publishers shown in italics are not participating in the Initiative for Open Citations by making their publications’ reference lists open at Crossref—see https://i4oc.org for additional information Resources and services
The citation data in COCI can be accessed in a variety of convenient ways, listed as follows.
Open Citation Index SPARQL endpoint We have made available a SPARQL endpoint for all the indexes released by OpenCitations, including COCI, which is available at https://w3id.org/oc/index/sparql. When accessed with a browser, it shows a SPARQL endpoint editor GUI generated with YASGUI (Rietveld and Hoekstra 2017). Of course, this SPARQL endpoint can additionally be queried using the REST HTTP protocol, e.g. via curl. In order to access COCI data, the graph https://w3id.org/oc/index/coci/ must be specified in the SPARQL query.
COCI REST API Citation data in COCI can be retrieved by using the COCI REST API, available at https://w3id.org/oc/index/coci/api/v1. The rationale of making available a REST API—implemented by means of RAMOSE, the Restful API Manager Over SPARQL Endpoints (https://github.com/opencitations/ramose)—in addition to the SPARQL endpoint was to provide convenient access to the citation data included in COCI for Web developers and users who are not necessarily experts in Semantic Web technologies. The COCI REST API makes available four operations, that will retrieve either (a) the citation data for all the outgoing references of a given DOI (operation: references), or (b) the citation data for all the incoming citations received by a given DOI (operation: citations), or (c) the citation data for the citation identified by an OCI (operation: citation), or (d) the metadata for the article(s) identified by the specified DOI or DOIs (operation: metadata). It is worth mentioning that the latter operation strictly depends on live API calls to external services to gather the metadata of the requested articles, such as the title, the authors, and the journal name, that are not explicitly included within the OpenCitations Index triplestore.
Searching and browsing interfaces We have additionally developed a user-friendly text search interface (https://w3id.org/oc/index/search), and a browsing interface (e.g. https://w3id.org/oc/index/browser/coci/ci/02001010806360107050663080702026306630509-02001010806360107050663080702026305630301), that can be used to search citation data in all the OpenCitations Indexes, including COCI, and to visualise and browse them, respectively. These two interfaces have been developed by means of OSCAR, the OpenCitations RDF Search Application (https://github.com/opencitations/oscar) (Heibi et al. 2019b), and LUCINDA, the OpenCitations RDF Resource Browser (https://github.com/opencitations/lucinda), that provide a configurable layer over SPARQL endpoints that permit one easily to create Web interfaces for querying and visualising the results of SPARQL queries.
Data dumps All the citation data and provenance information in COCI are available as dumps stored in Figshare (https://figshare.com) in both CSV and N-Triples formats, while a dump of the whole triplestore is available on The Internet Archive (https://archive.org). The links to these dumps are available on the download page of the OpenCitations website (http://opencitations.net/download#coci).
Direct HTTP access All the citation data in COCI can be accessed directly by means of the HTTP IRIs of the stored resources (via content negotiation, e.g. https://w3id.org/oc/index/coci/ci/02001010806360107050663080702026306630509-02001010806360107050663080702026305630301).