Digital Infrastructures for Scholarly Content Objects

Jodi Schneider, Anita de Waard, Wolf-Tilo Balke, Xiaoguang Wang, Ningyuan Song, Bolin Hua, Yuanxi Fu

Abstract: As digital libraries make the dissemination of research publications easier, they also enable the propagation of invalid or unreliable knowledge. Examples of relevant problems include: retraction and inadvertent citation and reuse of retracted papers [1], [2]; propagation of errors in literature and scientific databases [3], [4]; non-reproducible papers; known domain-specific issues such as cell line contamination [5]; bias in research datasets and publications [6]–[8]; systematic reviews that arrive at different conclusions about the same question at the same time [9], [10]. The digital environment facilitates broad interdisciplinary reuse beyond the originating scientific community; thus, marking known problems and tracing the impact on dependent and follow-on works is particularly important (but still under-addressed). Further, context-specific information inside a paper may not be immediately reusable when extracted by automated processes, leading to apparent contradictions [11]. Current mitigating approaches use the underlying reasoning for information retrieval [12], [13], develop new infrastructures analyzing the reasoning [14]–[16] or certainty [17] of statements, or use visualization to highlight possible discrepancies [10], [15].