This blog post is the first of a series which will highlight some of the ways OpenCitations is currently adopted and used by the community. This series also gives us the chance to thank our users for trusting OpenCitations and for giving us the opportunity to improve our services through their feedback. With you, OpenCitations is a drop generating countless circular waves of innovation in research.
The dblp computer science bibliography (https://dblp.org/) is the on-line reference for bibliographic information on major computer science publications, with the mission “to support computer science researchers in their daily efforts by providing free access to high-quality bibliographic meta-data and links to the electronic editions of publications”.
Currently, dblp indexes over 7 million publications, published by more than 3.4 million authors. Despite the small team of editors from the Schloss Dagstuhl, which run the service, in the last few years, dblp has grown from a small-scale server to a service used by thousands of people worldwide.
In 2022, they released the dblp Knowledge Graph, and in June 2024 they released a first major extension to the dblp KG by adding publications venues (e.g., journals and conference series) as first-class entities to the graph. This new release also includes a new property (i.e. dblp:omid) to link dblp publications to their OpenCitations Meta Identifier (OMID). This ID is crucial for making use of open citation and reference data available in OpenCitations since it is the internal identifier we use to identify every bibliographic entity (publications, authors, venues, etc.) stored in our system.
Indeed, the dblp computer science bibliography doesn’t collect and store citation information itself, but instead ingest directly the open citation data released by OpenCitations. Using the linkage provided by OMID, the dblp users can perform citation analyses using its SPARQL query service.
Dblp has published a detailed guide to help “beginners” find data in the dblp Knowledge Graph, and you can find it here.
If you are looking for more information about the dblp project, please explore their exhaustive F.A.Qs.
Thank you, dblp, for reusing OpenCitations data!