Direct Citations Network on the topic of Digital Scholarship - Open Dataset

The concept of Digital Scolarship -DS-(Borgman, 2007; Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, & Kinsley, 2012; Weller, 2011) defines new forms of academics' professional practices linked to the changing cultural, social and working context of the digital age. However, the empirical research efforts relating this construct seem to emerge in a rather chaotic conceptual and methodological landscape, where several disciplines are contributing. In line with this problem, in this research work the authors have formulated the following operational hypothesis: as a mixed disciplinary topic of research, the DS is at its very first stages with high dispersion and fragmentation of conceptual bases for both further theoretical elaboration as well as empirical research. Going in the direction of this endeavor, in this research work the authors have carried out a systematic review of literature based on 45 journal articles coming out from 4 relevant scientific information databases. The present dataset, introducing the data used to build a Cross-citation Bibliometric Map, has been used as complementary method integrating an approach of systematic review of the literature. The bibliometric maps are a form of representation of scientific networks, used in the Scientometrics as a mean to "mapping science" or understanding connections between researchers and research. Bibliometric maps are based on three main elements: statistical analysis of written publications (often including text and data mining); methods of visualization (distance-based; graph-based; timeline-based) and digital tools supporting analysis and visualization. The bibliometric maps consist of nodes as well as edges; while the first constituting element may represent publications, journals, researchers or keywords, the second represents forms of relationship between the nodes. Taking into consideration the type of nodes, the focus of analysis and type of emerging map are diversified. The most frequent types of relationship studied by bibliometric maps are: citation relations, co-authorship relations and key-word co-occurrence (Van Eck & Waltman, op.cit, p. 2-4). Within a sample of publications that are normally representative of a specific area or field of research, the first type explore the relationship between publications, the second the connections between a network of researchers, and the third, the distribution of topics. The forms of visualization explore not only a current, static relationship but also highlight eventual groups (clusters) that are "closer" within the relationship, as well as the evolution (if we take into consideration the timeline). The bibliometric maps are not a matter of educational research; however, the availability of new techniques to process scientific information about a specific field of research (i.e., the processes of metadata tracking modelling information across big scientific databases like WOS or SCOPUS; the adoption of data mining to explore big masses of data; and the existing softwares connected to advanced ways of representing/visualizing data) endow researchers to explore the literature in diversified ways in order to confirm or discard assumptions about the trends of research. The cross-citation bibliometric map was built in order to understand the relationships between cited and citing papers, that is, how the authors built on the other colleagues' work, showing hence the "awareness" of other's work in the same strand (e.g., NS) or the other two strands (e.g., DL and DH), as issue raised from the prior analysis. In fact, the software selected (CitNetExplorer, http://www.citnetexplorer.nl/) to this purpose helped to visualize the relevant publications within the sample (and relating to the topic of DS) as well as the citational relationships across a time span, i.e., the one covered by the sample (45 papers) expanded with the 3 most important books (1990-2015). The dataset is composed hence by two files: A- A file including the matrix combining the citation index and cited index (adjancency map), which was built manually extracting and integrating data from WOS and SCOPUS) and calculated the citational index for each paper (the number of times that a publication is cited overall within the sample). B- A text file including all the analyzed articles' metadata, required by the software CiteNet Explorer. Over these basis, several visualizations from CitNetExplorer were obtained; these visualizations are included in a third file (Word). Please consider the Full report to contextualize this dataset: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288994707