I’m behind in consulting the literature for references to figshare.
From participating in the 2013 Walter E. Dean Environmental Information Management Institute, I am aware of a trend in research for using scholarly databases to conduct a “meta analysis.”
The book about meta analysis we referenced for the course in Environmental Information Visualization was “Handbook of Meta-analysis in Ecology and Evolution, available online from Princeton University Press at <http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10045.html>.
This site describes meta analysis, so I might as well paste it here for review:
Meta-analysis is a powerful statistical methodology for synthesizing research evidence across independent studies.
The visualization I did for my class project concerned the frequency of the term “data sharing” by both discipline and by year. I created a “heat map” of the prevalence of the term in titles and abstracts indexed by a major online index of scholarly journals. I grouped the journal articles into similar disciplines using Ulrich’s Web as a controlled vocabulary.
I’m thinking I can do something similar to understand how figshare is being used.
I have two questions in looking at figshare in journal article databases.
First, I’m curious if figshare appears in social science databases, or in journal articles concerning information science, library science, usability, etc.
Secondly, I’m curious if figshare’s citation and use will be apparent in journal articles.
From an earlier notebook entry, I established that the various means of sharing content can result in a diverse set of URLs, ranging from “share.es” to “dx.doi.org.”
My understanding of the DOI system is that each publisher has a unique code. Therefore, it would follow that figshare would have a unique DOI. A quick glance at the wikipedia entry on DOIs suggests this understanding is somewhat limited: CrossRef assigns DOIs on behalf of 3,000 publishers for scholarly works, DataCite is for research datasets, and there are other offices that assign DOIs that probably have their own unique DOI.
I did a search for figshare AND doi on google and found this figshare blog entry dated October 9, 2013, entitled “All research outputs should be citable” and states “As of today, all figshare content will have it’s own DOI.” Full article at <http://figshare.com/blog/All%20research%20outputs%20should%20be%20citable/32>.
Interestingly figshare has partnered with the California Digital Library on this – which contributes to DataONE tools such as DataUP.
Unfortunately I believe this means my supposition concerning all figshare dx.doi short URLs having a consistent “figshare” publisher’s code is probably incorrect. On the bright side, they will be trackable going forward – probably why “citation coming soon” was noted in a previous post. Figshare comments to this effect:
This means that we will soon be recording how many times each object on figshare has been cited.
I want to get a sense of how some of the older URLs might have been stored. Without seeing a whole dataset I don’t think it’s possible to see a pattern, but maybe I can just get an idea of the urls pre-and-post consistent DOI.
I navigated to:
http://figshare.com/articles/browse#thumb
Narrowed results to “Showing: Earth Sciences.”
I need to look at some datasets from after October 9, 2013.
Since it’s sorted by “most recent” this isn’t hard.
I’m just going to open every 20th resource in hopes that that will be somewhat random.
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.815884
Systematic review is a research synthesis on a precisely denied topic using explicit methods to identify, select, critically appraise, and analyze relevant research. The crucial element of the systematic review that distinguishes it from an ordinary narrative review is an a priori protocol, which describes the methodology, including detailed search strategy and inclusion criteria. This review protocol makes the review process rigorous, transparent, and repeatable.
