Mining Open Government Data Used in Scientific Research

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how open government data (OGD) is increasingly used in scientific research from 2009 to 2016, highlighting diverse sources and the significant role of data from developing nations.

Contribution

It introduces a new method for categorizing OGD usage in research and provides comprehensive statistics on OGD sources and their impact across communities.

Findings

OGD use in research increased from 2009 to 2016

Researchers utilize data from 96 different portals

Developing nations' OGD significantly contribute to research

Abstract

In the following paper, we describe results from mining citations, mentions, and links to open government data (OGD) in peer-reviewed literature. We inductively develop a method for categorizing how OGD are used by different research communities, and provide descriptive statistics about the publication years, publication outlets, and OGD sources. Our results demonstrate that, 1. The use of OGD in research is steadily increasing from 2009 to 2016; 2. Researchers use OGD from 96 different open government data portals, with data.gov.uk and data.gov being the most frequent sources; and, 3.Contrary to previous findings, we provide evidence suggesting that OGD from developing nations, notably India and Kenya, are being frequently used to fuel scientific discoveries. The findings of this paper contribute to ongoing research agendas aimed at tracking the impact of open government data initiatives, and provides an initial description of how open government data are valuable to diverse scientific research communities.