Since 2008 the GBIF Secretariat has been tracking the use of GBIF-mediated data in research literature. Though often limited to articles in scientific, peer-reviewed journals, citations of GBIF datasets and downloads also make their way into other types of publications, including academic dissertations, environmental impact assessments, books, technical reports, and a wide range of websites.
The literature tracking programme involves categorizing literature at a high level (type of literature, relevance to GBIF, peer-review status, etc.) and also at a finer level (topics, countries of focus/researchers, GBIF use, etc.). Once an item has been validated and properly categorized, we add it to the literature index and it becomes visible and searchable on GBIF.org.
You can search for literature by keywords (e.g. words used in the title, author names, etc.) and a number of search facets. Here's a few examples to illustrate how easy it is:
Searching by keywords
Let's say I wanted to find GBIF-relevant papers related to Lassa fever:
Easy!
Searching using facets
As with occurrence searches, searching in literature and other resources provides the option of using facets to narrow your search. For literature, these are your main options:
Countries Of Researcher
Example: Let's find all papers authored by researchers in Sweden
155 papers - go Sweden!
Countries Of Coverage
Example: Or, how about papers with a specific geographic coverage, say Antarctica:
23 papers added to my reading list!
Literature Type
Example: You want books, theses, or just plain ol' journal articles? Take your pick:
Relevance
Example: To filter by relevance to the GBIF community, you can select to see papers that simply cite GBIF (GBIF Cited), or papers that make substantial use of GBIF-mediated data (GBIF Used).
The remaining options are
- Discussed: papers that discuss GBIF
- Primary: papers where GBIF is the main source of data
- Acknowledged: papers that acknowledge GBIF
- Published: papers that describe data published in GBIF
- Author: papers authored by GBIF staff
- Mentioned: papers that mention GBIF
- Funded: papers funded by GBIF
Year
Example: If you are only interested in items published in a specific period, use the slider to narrow your search. For just one single year, choose is from the drop-down and pick your year.
Topic
Example: Want to find all papers about citizen science? Climate change? Invasive alien species? The topic facet will help you!
Peer-reviewed
Example: Just want the gold standard of scientific literature? Apply the peer-reviwed filter, and you're set.
Open access
Example: To be able to read and re-use research papers freely, open access is the way to go. This filter allows you to get just the OA literature and avoid hitting those pesky paywalls.
Combining facets
You can combine the use of search facets to make your searches even more specific. A few examples:
- Peer-reviewed journal articles using GBIF-mediated data published by German researchers in 2014
- All books mentioning GBIF
- Publications by Mexican authors on biodiversity in Mexico
- Open Access papers on human health making substantial use of GBIF-mediated data
And so on...
Linking literature to data
When researchers make use of data from GBIF.org in their studies, we strongly encourage them to use standard citations that include unique DOIs representing exactly the data they downloaded. This practice ensures proper attribution of data holders and publishers, and facilitates reproducibility of research. While the uptake of DOIs in data citations has been slow, it is steadily increasing. And with the new GBIF.org in place, we can use these citations to show links between scientific literature and data published in GBIF.org.
In literature searches, you can access papers by links to data either by a specific dataset or publisher. For example, let's find all papers that used data in the Australia's Virtual Herbarium dataset:
Direct links to such citations are also visible publisher and download pages. For example, the GBIF Benin publisher page:
Most cited datasets
Among the occurrence datasets with the CC0 license waiver, the following have received the highest number of DOI citations: