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I hesitate to review a new-born database that its developers describe as "a non-stop development effort that will never be 'finished.'" Yet Dimensions, the brainchild of Digital Science & Research Solutions, Inc., whose offerings focus on different aspects of the research lifecycle (think ReadCube, Altmetric, Overleaf), is pretty amazing, even in its infancy (app.dimensions.ai). It's also complex in its offerings, so I will narrow my focus to its data sources, their linkages, search, results, and the implications for information literacy.
Digital Science launched Dimensions in January 2018. To think of Dimensions simply as a search tool would be to miss the point. Its promotional material describes it as "re-imagining discovery and access to research: grants, publications, citations, clinical trials and patents in one place" (dimensions. ai/info/researcher). Dimensions can be many things to many kinds of users. Using shared resources and expertise, a number of research organizations integrated their technology in an attempt to link all aspects of the research lifecycle into one platform.
I took note of four key features of the Dimensions Database: its partnerships with funders, its promotion of open access (OA) scholarly resources, its clarity about its data sources, and its commitment to eliciting feedback from all users.
More complex features come at a cost, but its OA search tool is powerful in itself. I can't hope, in one column, to cover even a fraction of Dimensions' features, so I will concentrate on its free application that makes publications data and metrics (including citations) freely available for researchers to use. More complex features for use beyond search and discovery require a subscription, but the free version is a powerful tool by itself.
SOURCES
Dimensions, unlike Google Scholar, clearly lists the sources of its data on its site. Online searchers should applaud this. The almost 92 million publications in Dimensions currently come from CrossRef, PubMed, Europe PMC (PubMed Central), Repack (Research Papers in Economics), and bioRxiv, with more preprints coming from arXiv and ChemRxiv databases later this year. It includes such resources as journal articles, books, and conference papers. As much as possible, each citation is linked to relevant grants, patents, and clinical trials.
To address the issue of predatory publishers and maintain quality, Dimensions offers journal whitelists as filters: PubMed, ERA 2015,...