Semantic web for reliable citation analysis in scholarly publishing

Abstract

Analysis of the impact of scholarly artifacts is constrained by current unreliable practices in cross-referencing, cita-tion discovering, and citation indexing and analysis, which have not kept pace with the technological advances that are occurring in several areas like knowledge man-agement and security. Because citation analysis has become the primary component in scholarly impact fac-tor calculation, and considering the relevance of this metric within both the scholarly publishing value chain and (especially important) the professional curriculum evaluation of scholarly professionals, we defend that cur-rent practices need to be revised. This paper describes a reference architecture that aims to provide openness and reliability to the citation-tracking lifecycle. The solution relies on the use of digitally signed semantic metadata in the different stages of the scholarly publishing workflow in such a manner that authors, publishers, repositories, and citation-analysis systems will have access to inde-pendent reliable evidences that are resistant to forgery, impersonation, and repudiation. As far as we know, this is the first paper to combine Semantic Web technologies and public-key cryptography to achieve reliable citation analysis in scholarly publishing.