Refcat: The Internet Archive Scholar Citation Graph

TL;DR

The paper introduces refcat, a large-scale citation graph dataset from the Internet Archive, combining scholarly publications, web crawls, and metadata, to facilitate research in scholarly data analysis.

Contribution

It presents the first version of refcat, a comprehensive citation graph dataset derived from multiple sources, with open access and accompanying source code.

Findings

Contains over 1.3 billion citations

Includes data from scholarly publications, web crawls, and metadata sources

Released under open licenses for public use

Abstract

As part of its scholarly data efforts, the Internet Archive (IA) releases a first version of a citation graph dataset, named refcat, derived from scholarly publications and additional data sources. It is composed of data gathered by the fatcat cataloging project (the catalog that underpins IA Scholar), related web-scale crawls targeting primary and secondary scholarly outputs, as well as metadata from the Open Library project and Wikipedia. This first version of the graph consists of over 1.3B citations. We release this dataset under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication, accessible through Internet Archive. The source code used for the derivation process, including exact and fuzzy citation matching, is released under an MIT license. The goal of this report is to describe briefly the current contents and the derivation of the dataset.