Defining discovery: Is Google Scholar a discovery platform? An essay on the need for a new approach to scholarly discovery

Abstract

This essay discusses the concept of discovery, intended as content discovery, and defines it in the new context of Open Science, with a focus on Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Starting from the example of Google Scholar, the authors show that this well established service does not address the current needs, practices, and variety of discovery. Alternatives in terms of technical choices, features, and governance, do however exist, offering richer and more open discovery. The paper presents in particular the implementations and research work of the H2020 project TRIPLE (Transforming Research through Innovative Practices for Linked Interdisciplinary Exploration). Dedicated to the building of a discovery platform for the SSH, the project is meant to address the specificities and evolution of discovery in this field. Prevailing scholarly resource platforms like Google Scholar limit discovery by focussing only on publications, and favouring through their algorithm well-cited papers, English content, and discipline-specific resources. A limitation in the context of cross-disciplinary and collaborative Open Science, such a service more specifically hinders discovery in the SSH. Characterized by a fragmented landscape, a variety of languages, data types, and outputs, research in the SSH requires services that fully exploit discovery potentialities. Moreover, a survey conducted within the TRIPLE project showed that most SSH researchers use Google Scholar as their starting point, and that they recognise the lack of control they have with this system. Beyond the extension of features and content, transparency is the other important criterion for the building of an Open Infrastructure actually serving the research community. In light of this, we present in some detail the GoTriple platform, which exploits today’s technological potential and incorporates the best known functionalities in order to unveil more and innovative scholarly outputs and lead to international and interdisciplinary research project collaborations.

Exploring named‐entity recognition techniques for academic books

“…It will also allow scientific content produced in languages other than English to be more visible and discoverable in the digital environment. OPERAS European infrastructure has developed multilingual scientific content discovery system, GoTRIPLE (Achenbach et al, 2022; Di Donato et al, 2021), in which metadata, translation and multilingual terminology are fundamental to their performance and, ultimately, to the projection of scientific content in different languages. This is a significant example of how relevant it is to work with NLP in every language.…”

CoDesign for Discovery in Social Sciences and Humanities

“…The creation of GoTriple follows therefore the goal to create a single access point for SSH discovery, and it has been based on three key pillars: 1) the promotion of Open Science principles; 2) the inclusion of a significant multilingualism component; and 3) a strong involvement of the users during the design process. Elsewhere we have discussed how GoTriple seeks to overcome the limits of proprietary solutions (Achenbach et al, 2022), by advancing open science principles such as open access and promoting multilingualism in discovery. Currently GoTriple supports discovery in 11 languages, including Polish, Croatian, Portuguese, Ukranian and Italian.…”