'Intelligence Studies Network': A human-curated database for indexing resources with open-source tools

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Intelligence Studies Network, a human-curated, open-source tool-based database that indexes and visualizes intelligence studies resources, demonstrating the feasibility of creating specialized academic databases with open-source tools.

Contribution

It presents a novel workflow combining automatic monitoring, manual curation, and open-source tools to build a specialized academic database in intelligence studies.

Findings

Effective resource monitoring and curation workflow

Integration of Zotero, OpenAlex, and Streamlit for database management

Validation of open-source tools for specialized academic databases

Abstract

The Intelligence Studies Network is a comprehensive resource database for publications, events, conferences, and calls for papers in the field of intelligence studies. It offers a novel solution for monitoring, indexing, and visualising resources. Sources are automatically monitored and added to a manually curated database, ensuring the relevance of items to intelligence studies. Curated outputs are stored in a group library on Zotero, an open-source reference management tool. The metadata of items in Zotero is enriched with OpenAlex, an open access bibliographic database. Finally, outputs are listed and visualised on a Streamlit app, an open-source Python framework for building apps. This paper aims to explain the Intelligence Studies Network database and provide a detailed guide on data sources and the workflow. This study demonstrates that it is possible to create a specialised academic database by using open source tools.