Identifying Data Sharing and Reuse with Scholix: Potentials and Limitations

The Scholexplorer API, based on the Scholix (Scholarly Link eXchange) framework, aims to identify links between articles and supporting data. This quantitative case study demonstrates that the API vastly expanded the number of datasets previously known to be affiliated with University of Bath outputs, allowing improved monitoring of compliance with funder mandates by identifying peer-reviewed articles linked to at least one unique dataset. Availability of author names for research outputs increased from 2.4% to 89.2%, which enabled identification of ten articles reusing non-Bath-affiliated datasets published in external repositories in the first phase, giving valuable evidence of data reuse and impact for data producers. Of these, only three were formally cited in the references. Further enhancement of the Scholix schema and enrichment of Scholexplorer metadata using controlled vocabularies would be beneficial. The adoption of standardized data citations by journals will be critical to creating links in a more systematic manner.