Open citations in Informatics

The launch of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) has been a tipping point towards the availability of open citation data. While, before it, only a few projects have tried to create small repositories of open citations, I4OC catalysed the worldwide attention to the issue. It resulted in an unprecedented mass availability of citation data that could be reused for any purpose. From there, several new databases have arisen, e.g. the Indexes created by OpenCitations such as COCI, and new and existing applications and repositories started to use such new data systematically, e.g. VOSviewer and DBLP. In this talk, I introduce open citations, focusing mainly on the Informatics field, showing the current status and limits, and analysing possible uses of open citations in research assessment exercises