Visualizing Global Collaborations: Democratizing Access to Persistent Identifier Metadata and Analysis

This poster investigates the opportunities and current challenges involved in using persistent identifier (PID) metadata to understand organizational research activity. A 2022 project led by the ORCID US Community (administered by Lyrasis) in partnership with the Drexel University LIS Education And Data Science Integrated Network Group (LEADING) program resulted in a suite of open tools that reduce the barrier to accessing and using ORCID data in meaningful ways. The LEADING fellows created an R script that can be used to retrieve information about publishing collaborations between researchers at a home organization and other organizations across the globe based on metadata from researchers’ ORCID profiles and publication DOI metadata. The resulting dataset can be imported into a Tableau Public dashboard template, resulting in data visualizations that may be shared with stakeholders to demonstrate researcher activity and start a conversation about impact. Despite gaps in the ORCID and DOI metadata, such as authors with no ORCID profile or an incomplete ORCID profile, the data and visualization tools can be used to advance research connections in several ways. The tools allow viewers to explore an organization’s collaborative reach and show opportunities for improving global partnerships. The suite also allows individuals to filter to their own data and could provide support for highly and widely collaborative researchers’ tenure and promotion. This democratized access to aggregated PID data can help individuals and under-resourced organizations without in-house technical staff to retrieve ORCID API data and create custom visualizations. This poster will give viewers ideas on how they can visualize PID and collaboration data for their own organizations to better understand their global footprint and to show opportunities for expanding and diversifying their research partnerships.