ckanext-citations

Citation tracking (cited-by, via OpenAlex with a DataCite Event Data fallback), a per-dataset disruption index, and a per-researcher S-index ("how many unique researchers has your data enabled" - see s-index.science), displayed on the dataset page.

v1 scope

This first iteration deliberately does not implement the 17 FAIRsFAIR/F-UJI metrics, a merged "FAIR score", or the metadata-enrichment assistant described in the original design note. It covers only the citation/impact-tracking half:

• Citation count (cited-by) per dataset.
• Disruption index (Wu, Wang & Evans, 2019): DI = (N_F - N_B) / (N_F + N_B + N_R).
• S-index per ORCID: count of distinct researchers (deduplicated by ORCID, falling back to normalised name) who authored a work citing any of that researcher's FAIR3R datasets.
• Display on the dataset page (citation count, disruption index, S-index with a co-author breakdown, a citing-works table).

Why dedicated tables, not package_extra

Citations and scores are refreshed by a periodic batch job, not by the user editing the dataset. Writing them through package_update/package_extra would create a package_revision row and trigger a full Solr reindex for every dataset on every refresh run - pure overhead for data nobody searches on. Instead this plugin owns five Postgres tables of its own (fair_citation_stats, fair_citing_works, fair_citing_researchers, fair_author_sindex, fair_score_history), created via the same Alembic-based migration mechanism as ckanext-doi (ckan db upgrade -p citations).

fair_citing_researchers exists only to make the S-index's "unique researchers" dedup correct across an author's several datasets: it's one row per (FAIR3R author ORCID, citing-researcher identity) pair, and fair_author_sindex.s_index_current is the cached COUNT(DISTINCT ...) over it. Both the citation count and the S-index are also tracked as high-water marks (*_max) so a researcher's score never visibly regresses just because an external API temporarily deduplicates differently between two refresh runs.

The disruption index needs a reference list the dataset usually doesn't have

The Wu/Wang/Evans formula needs to know what the focal work's own references are, to tell "citing works that also build on the same sources" (N_B) apart from "citing works that only cite the focal work" (N_F). OpenAlex rarely has a populated reference list for a dataset-type Work, which would make N_B/N_R collapse to 0 and the index trivially tend to +1.0 for almost every dataset with any citations at all.

To get a meaningful signal, the reference set is enriched with the dataset's own DataCite relatedIdentifiers whose relationType is References or Cites (already supported by the FDF schema via ckanext-doi) - each such DOI is resolved to an OpenAlex work id and added to the focal work's reference set before classifying citing works.

Config

# Contact email sent as OpenAlex's "polite pool" mailto param (better rate
# limits, not auth). Optional but recommended.
ckanext.citations.contact_email = your-team@example.org

# Pause between outbound API calls during a refresh, in seconds.
ckanext.citations.request_pause_seconds = 0.1

S-index

The S-index is cumulative: the number of distinct researchers (by ORCID, or by normalised name when there is no ORCID) that an author's FAIR3R datasets have reached since tracking started. A researcher is never removed, because OpenAlex data is not stable (merged, re-linked or temporarily missing works) and a recalculation from the current citers would lower the score without any real change. s_index_max is kept as a safety net, and equals the current value in practice.

Bounding the disruption index

The reference set and the citers of each reference are capped, so a refresh stays cheap even for a work with very popular references:

# At most this many references are used for the disruption index.
ckanext.citations.max_references = 10

# For each reference, only this many citing works are read.
ckanext.citations.max_reference_citers = 200

With these caps, the "reference only" count is an approximation, and the disruption index is diluted by it. Read it as a relative signal.

Running a refresh

ckan citations refresh --min-age-days 7

Idempotent and safe to run repeatedly: only datasets whose fair_citation_stats.last_checked is older than --min-age-days (or NULL, i.e. never checked) are touched. Intended to run from a weekly cron job, same pattern as fair3r update-schema.

Tests

Two test.ini files, same convention as the other FAIR3R extensions:

• test.ini at the repo root: Docker DEV (/srv/app/src/ckan/test-core.ini).
• ckanext/citations/tests/test.ini: shipped with the package, used by deploy/ckanext_test.py on integration/validation (/usr/lib/ckan/default/...).

docker exec -u ckan -it ckan-app pytest --ckan-ini=/plugins/ckanext-citations/test.ini /plugins/ckanext-citations/ckanext/citations/tests