Identifying references to datasets in publications

Abstract

Research data and publications are usually stored in separate and structurally distinct information systems. Often, links between these resources are not explicitly available which complicates the search for previous research. In this paper, we propose a pattern induction method for the detection of study references in full texts. Since these references are not specified in a standardized way and may occur inside a variety of different contexts - i.e., captions, footnotes, or continuous text - our algorithm is required to induce very flexible patterns. To overcome the sparse distribution of training instances, we induce patterns iteratively using a bootstrapping approach. We show that our method achieves promising results for the automatic identification of data references and is a first step towards building an integrated information system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.