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What SCOPE Provides

What the project will provide​

Reusable datasets​

SCOPE will collect, integrate, document, and publish research datasets derived from public or appropriately authorized sources.

Potential data categories include:

  • publications, preprints, and publication histories;
  • authorship and collaboration networks;
  • citations and reference networks;
  • conference submissions, decisions, and publicly available reviews;
  • research topics, methods, datasets, benchmarks, and artifacts;
  • code and data availability;
  • corrections, retractions, replications, and follow-up studies;
  • funding programs and institutional policies;
  • researcher career and mobility patterns;
  • conference and journal evaluation policies;
  • declared or statistically estimated uses of AI in scientific communication;
  • adoption of research in software, standards, patents, clinical guidance, public policy, education, and technical infrastructure.

Each released dataset should include its provenance, collection date, schema, known limitations, applicable license, and reproducible construction procedure.

SCOPE will favor frozen and versioned data releases so that published analyses can be reproduced even when upstream databases change.

Data-collection and analysis tools​

The repository will contain reusable tools for collecting, cleaning, linking, validating, and analyzing research data.

These may include:

  • connectors for scholarly databases and public APIs;
  • venue and field classification tools;
  • author and institution disambiguation pipelines;
  • citation-network construction;
  • publication-growth analysis;
  • topic and semantic-similarity analysis;
  • research novelty and consolidation measurements;
  • peer-review analysis;
  • artifact and reproducibility tracking;
  • policy-change and event-study analysis;
  • dataset validation and quality-control utilities;
  • visualization and report-generation tools.

Tools should be modular and documented so that other researchers can reproduce SCOPE studies, examine different disciplines, or use individual components in their own work.

Initial research-data collector​

The independently installable collector/ package collects bounded, source-native public metadata from OpenAlex, DBLP, ORCID, and arXiv. Its fixture-first validation workflow and offline checks are documented in the collector/ guide, with bounded requests in the collector/examples/ guide.

Its contributor-facing implementation is organized into the registered collector/downloaders/, offline collector/processors/, and end-to-end collector/pipelines/ catalogs, including concrete DBLP person and publication dataset workflows.

Local pages and candidates remain in ignored working state. Only snapshots that pass provenance, quality, privacy, licensing, and repository-size review may enter the governed data/ area; restricted or oversized collections publish permitted reproducibility metadata instead. This module does not collect paper full text, merge identities or publications across sources, rank researchers, run analysis, or depend on the website.

Empirical reports​

SCOPE will publish reports investigating specific questions about science and academic institutions.

Possible topics include:

  • whether publication growth is driven by more researchers, greater productivity, larger teams, or publication fragmentation;
  • whether scientific output is growing faster than the capacity to review, read, reproduce, and consolidate it;
  • changes in the novelty, diversity, reliability, and reuse of research;
  • concentration around particular institutions, companies, countries, models, datasets, or technical infrastructure;
  • the relationship between academic incentives and researcher behavior;
  • the effects of citation counts, publication counts, venue prestige, and other evaluation targets;
  • the quality, consistency, and labor distribution of peer review;
  • the effects of generative AI on papers, reviews, research practices, and participation;
  • the relationship between research funding and scientific or societal outcomes;
  • how research moves from publication into engineering, public policy, education, healthcare, standards, and other forms of public value;
  • the intended and unintended consequences of academic policy changes.

Reports should clearly distinguish descriptive evidence, statistical association, causal inference, and normative recommendation.

Public website​

A Docusaurus-based website will make SCOPE’s work accessible to researchers, policymakers, journalists, students, and the public.

The website will include:

  • explanations of SCOPE’s research questions and methods;
  • interactive data visualizations;
  • dataset and tool documentation;
  • reproducible research reports;
  • policy briefs;
  • methodological notes;
  • definitions of important concepts and indicators;
  • summaries written for non-specialist audiences;
  • project news, progress, and contribution guides.

The website is intended to be hosted publicly through GitHub Pages.