1. European VIRTA pilot – current situation
ENRESSH meeting, WG3
November 8, 2017

2. Background and aims of the pilot project
Science policy and research evaluation at all levels of the European Research Area need support from reliable, comparable, and comprehensive information on research activity, productivity and quality.
Commercial databases, Web of Science or Scopus, do not provide complete coverage of research output in any field, especially in SSH fields
A pilot project on European VIRTA was launched in ENRESSH meeting Sofia, March 2017
The target is to explore the use of the Finnish VIRTA system across different countries in order to create a European publication information service
The pilot project also produces a commensurate dataset for certain bibliometric analyses

3. Principles for the European Research Infomation Service
Data transfer from national or local CRISes in a standardized format – annually or more frequently
All information freely available in a public portal
Via open APIs, the information usable for various purposes
National and institutional CRISes or other publication databases
XML files
European Research
Information Service
API
Using services (e.g. funders)
Public portal
Other use, e.g. CVs
Publication input service
(for non-CRIS organizations)

4. Pilot project – practical issues
Participating countries have reported their complete publication metadata from the years to VIRTA:
Norway: University of Oslo
Flanders: University of Antwerpen
Spain: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M)
Finland: University of Helsinki, University of Jyväskylä, Tampere University of Technology
Data format:
The pilots exported their own data into a CSV model file and converted the file into XML by using a CSV-XML tool.
Fields of science
The pilots mapped their publications into FoS classification
Finland and Oslo cover all fields, Antwerpen and Madrid only SSH

5. VIRTA pilot: number of publications

6. Issues of data comparability
Publications to be included
Publication types to be included
Publication type mapping
Disciplines
Detailed data format
Required and optional fields and local additions in data model

7. Issues of data comparability: publications to be included
The countries vary in terms of inclusion of different publications in their databases
Some databases are limited to only ”scientific”
Conclusion: No need for limitations in terms of which publications are included.
For comparability and further analysis, it is necessary to be able to separate different types of publications from each other in a consistent way. A need for standard defininitions of ”scientific”, ”peer-reviewed” etc.

8. Issues of data comparability: publication types to be included
The countries vary in terms of inclusion of different publication types in their databases:
Scientific only or non-scholarly publications as well (professional and popular books, articles, reports etc.)?
Conference presentations, short abstracts inluded?
Other research activities (expertise work, reviewer, awards etc.)?
Conclusion: No need for limitations in terms of inclusion criteria. For comparability and further analysis, it is more important that the publication types are consistent.

9. Issues of data comparability: Publication type mapping
All countries and citation databases have their own classifications for publication types
A mapping procedure can be applied but still the data are not fully comparable since the definitions of for example ”article”, ”book chapter” or ”scientific” vary
Conclusion: Need for international agreement on definition of publication types and classification of publication types. The mapping becomes more difficult as more countries are added.

10. Issues of data comparability: Publication type mapping
Finland / Madrid
Flanders
1=peer-reviewed / 0 = non peer-reviewed
Norway
Peer-reviewed articles
A1 Journal article, original research
VABB-1: journal article 1
3= Article in series (ISSN)
A2 Review article
A3 Book section
VABB-4: book chapter
2= Article in book (no ISSN)
A4 Conference proceedings
VABB-5: proceedings paper
Non peer-reviewed articles
B1 Non-refereed journal articles
B2 Book section
B3 Non-refereed conference proceedings
Monographs
C1 Book
VABB-2: monograph
1= Monograph
C2 Edited book
VABB-3: edited book
Professional
D1 Article in a trade journal
D2 Article in a professional book
D3 Professional conference proceedings
D4 Development or research report
D5 Textbook, professional manual or guide
D6 Edited professional book
Popular
E1 Popularised article, newspaper article
E2 Popularised monograph
E3 Edited popular book

11. VIRTA pilot: Publications by types

12. Issues of data comparability: Publication type mapping strategies
Take one system as starting point and try to map everything to that
Hard because publication types do not always match nicely
Lowest common denominator: limited set of very broad categories
Loss of information
Lowest common denominator with refimenents
Refinements used where possible
Broader categories used elsewhere

13. Issues of data comparability: Disciplines
A mapping procedure can be applied but still there may be variation in the definitions of the fields
The practices vary by country
Classification: 1) FoS classification fully , 2) FoS with local extensions, 3) other
Coverage of different fields of science
The field of science is defined by 1) the publication itself, 2) the journal of the publication, 3) the author of the publication, or 4) the organizational unit of the author
Only one or more fields per publication?
Proposal: All countries should use FoS for the project. A publication’s field should be decided upon using a ’cognitive’ system, based on the publication or publication channel.

14. Issues of comparability: Detailed data format
The pilot countries did not report having significant problems in converting their own datasets in the common format
The bibliographic data collected in the pilot is of high quality and consistency; most differences and variations are related to the classifications
Conclusion: The detailed data format can be agreed between countries no matter which systems or technologies they are using in their own national publication data collection.

15. Issues of data comparability: Required and optional field and local additions
Only the core information wasrequired as mandatory in the pilot: publication title, publication year, authors, publication type, field of science, organization authors
The other fields were optional, but necessary for co-publication identification, e.g. ISSN/ISBN, source title, volume, number, page numbers
The pilots had some local additions which were not included in the pilot
Abstracts etc.
Conclusion: The list of mandatory fields should be very short. Local additions should be allowed.

16. Additional data from the pilots
Next steps
Additional data from the pilots
More detailed bibliographic data
Coverage of all fields of science
Publication channel lists and rankings from other countries
Other countries can still join
Bibliometric analysis
The data collected in the pilot has its highest quality and consistency in terms of the bibliographic data
Focus on journal analysis

17. VIRTA pilot: Publications by Finnish Publication Forum levels