Measuring web connectivity between research organizations through ROR identifiers

TL;DR

This study measures the usage of ROR identifiers in the scholarly ecosystem by analyzing link-based indicators, revealing limited adoption and highlighting potential for future webometric and bibliometric research.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of ROR identifier links, quantifying their usage, sources, and geographic and institutional biases.

Findings

51.6% of ROR identifiers have been linked at least once

Links mainly originate from bibliographic records and organization profiles

Usage is biased towards Anglo-Saxon countries and organizations, especially educational institutions

Abstract

Digital information needs to be accessed and used in a manageable and sustainable manner to facilitate the advancement of science and science management. Many types of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) are already in use and well-established in support of the scholarly communication industry, mainly digital objects (e.g., DOIs) and person identifiers (e.g., ORCID). PIDs improve the interoperability of digital entities, make them reusable, and, at the same time, foster FAIR principles. The main objective of this exploratory work is to measure the degree and type of use of ROR identifiers by the online scientific and academic ecosystem through link-based indicators. The analysis yielded 149,851 links to ror.org webpages: 147,154 links to ROR-based URLs and 2,698 links to other informative webpages under the ror.org website. The results obtained evidence that the percentage of ROR identifiers linked is limited (51.6% of ROR identifiers have been linked at least once). These links come from a limited number of referring domains (242 unique domain names) and mainly from bibliographic records (51.4% of links) and organization cards (36% of links). While the distribution of ROR identifiers is biased towards Anglo-Saxon countries (mainly United States) and types (companies), the educational research organizations are the institutions most linked through their corresponding ROR-based URLs. The connectivity between DOIs, ORCIDs and RORs can be the spearhead to carry out new webometric and bibliometric studies, of interest to characterize the presence, impact, and interconnection of the global academic Web.