Can we measure the impact of a database?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Buneman, Peter, Dosso, Dennis, Lissandrini, Matteo, Silvello, Gianmaria, Sun, He
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Buneman, Peter
Dosso, Dennis
Lissandrini, Matteo
Silvello, Gianmaria
Sun, He
author_facet Buneman, Peter
Dosso, Dennis
Lissandrini, Matteo
Silvello, Gianmaria
Sun, He
contents In disseminating scientific and statistical data, on-line databases have almost completely replaced traditional paper-based media such as journals and reference works. Given this, can we measure the impact of a database in the same way that we measure an author's or journal's impact? To do this, we need somehow to represent a database as a set of publications, and databases typically allow a large number of possible decompositions into parts, any of which could be treated as a publication. We show that the definition of the h-index naturally extends to hierarchies, so that if a database admits some kind of hierarchical interpretation we can use this as one measure of the importance of a database; moreover, this can be computed as efficiently as one can compute the normal h-index. This also gives us a decomposition of the database that might be used for other purposes such as giving credit to the curators or contributors to the database. We illustrate the process by analyzing three widely used databases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09842
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can we measure the impact of a database?
Buneman, Peter
Dosso, Dennis
Lissandrini, Matteo
Silvello, Gianmaria
Sun, He
Databases
Digital Libraries
In disseminating scientific and statistical data, on-line databases have almost completely replaced traditional paper-based media such as journals and reference works. Given this, can we measure the impact of a database in the same way that we measure an author's or journal's impact? To do this, we need somehow to represent a database as a set of publications, and databases typically allow a large number of possible decompositions into parts, any of which could be treated as a publication. We show that the definition of the h-index naturally extends to hierarchies, so that if a database admits some kind of hierarchical interpretation we can use this as one measure of the importance of a database; moreover, this can be computed as efficiently as one can compute the normal h-index. This also gives us a decomposition of the database that might be used for other purposes such as giving credit to the curators or contributors to the database. We illustrate the process by analyzing three widely used databases.
title Can we measure the impact of a database?
topic Databases
Digital Libraries
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09842