A semi-automatic approach for detecting dataset references in social science texts

Today, full-texts of scientific articles are often stored in different locations than the used datasets. Dataset registries aim at a closer integration by making datasets citable but authors typically refer to datasets using inconsistent abbreviations and heterogeneous metadata (e.g. title, publication year). It is thus hard to reproduce research results, to access datasets for further analysis, and to determine the impact of a dataset. Manually detecting references to datasets in scientific articles is time-consuming and requires expert knowledge in the underlying research domain. We propose and evaluate a semi-automatic three-step approach for finding explicit references to datasets in social sciences articles. We first extract pre-defined special features from dataset titles in the da|ra registry, then detect references to datasets using the extracted features, and finally match the references found with corresponding dataset titles. The approach does not require a corpus of articles (avoiding the cold start problem) and performs well on a test corpus. We achieved an F-measure of 0.84 for detecting references in full-texts and an F-measure of 0.83 for finding correct matches of detected references in the da|ra dataset registry.