Another major feature as part of the April 2020 production release is something we have been working on for a while and we’re very pleased to say is ready to go live. At Figshare, we’re very fortunate to be part of the Digital Science family. As such, it means we often get to work in close collaboration with other sister companies, such as Altmetric doughnuts on Figshare pages and our widely-adopted Symplectic integration.

Working in conjunction with our friends at Dimensions, we’re pleased to be able to offer daily citations updates on any object within any Figshare instance. Not just papers, but datasets and videos and, well… anything!

How it works – in brief

We receive daily updates from Dimensions of the latest citation data. Dimensions are looking in the full text of documents and capturing any mention of a Figshare-affiliated DOI string. Citation data is actually stored within the Figshare database and is not pulled live, meaning we’ll be able to expose this in all kinds of interesting ways in the future e.g. citations over time, most cited, cumulative citations by group/lab.

We are not presenting this as an exhaustive and infalible list of all citations for Figshare objects. With continual refinements in coverage, indexing and parsing in the future, we can expect to pick up not only more mentions going forwards but also to increase the quantity and quality of the existing pool.  

Why it’s special

At Figshare, we are fully aware of the power of citations to an academic. It has been highlighted in our State of Open Data reports as the main motivator in sharing open data – more impact in the form of more citations

However, data citations still struggle to find their way into reference lists, but both funder and publisher requirements around open data have resulted in an exponential growth in citations to data across data repositories. For the most part, these ‘citations’ are found in the full text of the article, the methods section – or the data availability section.

As such, we have partnered with our sister company Dimensions to identify these citations in the full text of articles. This ensures that researchers, and our clients, are aware of all of the citations to their research.