Cassidy Sugimoto is Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington. She researches within the domain of scholarly communication and scientometrics, examining the formal and informal ways in which knowledge producers consume and disseminate scholarship. She has edited and co-edited four books and has published numerous journal articles on this topic. Her work has been presented at numerous conferences and has received research funding from the US National Science Foundation, Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Sloan Foundation, among other agencies. Cassidy is actively involved in teaching and service and has been rewarded in these areas with an Indiana University Trustees Teaching award (2014) and a national service award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (2009). She served as the President of the faculty at Indiana University in 2015-2016 and is currently serving as President of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Cassidy has an undergraduate degree in music performance, an M.S. in library science, and a Ph.D. in information and library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Celebrating ISSI’s Dimensions partnership, and a call for COVID-19 research
Over the last 15 years, we’ve witnessed an increase in the diversity of data sources which can be used for bibliometric analysis.
Launched in 2018, the Dimensions database is a relative newcomer to the bibliometric space, but unavoidable due to the sheer size and heterogeneity of the sources: the database contains more than 109 million scholarly papers, 40 million patents, as well as datasets, grants, clinical trials, and policy documents. It indexes all scholarly documents that have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), irrespective of their citation rates. This inclusive approach provides a more comprehensive and equitable lens on the production of science, particularly in the inclusion of national and non-English-language journals.
In September of last year, ISSI launched a partnership with Dimensions to provide enhanced access to Dimensions and Altmetric data for scientometric research. The goal of this partnership was to increase equity, diversity, transparency, and rigor in scientometric research. The applications are reviewed by a working group constituted of three ISSI Board members: Nees Jan van Eck (the Netherlands), Vincent Lariviere (Canada), and Cassidy R. Sugimoto (USA).
Since 1 October 2019, Dimensions has provided no-cost access to data for several ISSI members. At present, scholars from Canada, China, Denmark, France, Indian, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States have taken advantage of this opportunity. This is an excellent start for the first few months of the partnerships; however, we would like to extend this reach further, to ensure that members across the globe have access to this resource, in order to develop bibliometric expertise and enhance replicability in the field.
Given the current pandemic, we are prioritizing access to those who are working on research that can help inform our understanding of the pandemic. Therefore, we would like to extend an urgent call to the community to develop scientometric approaches to understanding developments in COVID-19 research.
To request no-cost access to Dimensions to study coronavirus research, visit Dimensions.ai. In your request, indicate that you are an ISSI member and the Dimensions team will work closely with us to review and approve your application, as quickly as possible.
For questions about membership access, please contact ISSI President Cassidy R. Sugimoto. For questions about the Dimensions/Altmetric data sources, please contact the Dimensions support team.