The Dream of Mainstream in TDWG, GBIF and SPNHC
Authors: Ariño Arturo 
Published: October 2024

The Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) have been providing nuts and bolts to biodiversity research for decades. Standards service the research community while requiring significant research themselves. Annual conferences gather a rather persistent group of practitioners who showcase the workings and products of the community (Ung and Kampmeier 2022). Is this effort visible to, and recognisable by, potential stakeholders?

One way to put our groups in perspective is to look at the mainstream scientific production using theirproducts. GBIF has long been keeping track of research using the records it mediates, as well as monitoring the literature citing GBIF itself. TDWG, on the other hand, while also keeping record of its history, does not have a similar mechanism—perhaps because TDWG’s (and SPNHC’s) usual outlets often may not be on a par with the preferred scientific venues: standard, peer-reviewed, indexed papers. Amazingly enough, a huge amount of work seems to be known only through conference abstracts, presentations and posters, which even though actually peer-reviewed, do not truly conform to the "gold standard" of scientific publications, and are often contemplated by many actors such as evaluation agencies as merely grey literature representing "fringe" research.

I have attempted to measure how much “mainstreamliness” TDWG, SPNHC and GBIF carry, by looking at how frequently their outputs show up in indexed research along with their citation patterns, and comparing those of other examples both related or unrelated to the three organizations’ remits.

METHODS

In 2024, I queried Web of Science (WoS), Scopus (SC), and Google Scholar (GS) repositories for papers according to each platform’s capabilities, separately targeting (whenever possible) titles, abstracts, keywords, main texts, and references cited (Table 1).

Queries were crafted to find output from four groups: one focal (TDWG, GBIF, SPNHC, and the Darwin Core standard, DwC), and three containing examples of related activity or concepts; specific, biodiversity-related research; and unrelated (“outgroup”) general research (Table 2). I kept a tally of hits and other data such as citation numbers, and downloaded (or mined in the case of GS) either the full list of references or a sample, depending on the platform’s limitation.

Exported references were combined in a database, filtered, and quality-checked. Indexed citation levels were obtained from either complete sets, or 10,000-record samples. The mainstream share was calculated as the quotient between WoS hits and GS hits per query.

I defined the relative balance, or leverage, of the community’s uptake as:

leverage = (SCc - SChl) / max[SCcm SChl]

where SCc is the number of citations reported by Scopus for the indexed hits, and SChl is the number of records found by querying the indexed references’ literature lists (which contain both indexed and non-indexed literature). The index is positive when fringe literature is cited preferentially by fringe literature, negative when fringe literature is disproportionately cited by indexed literature, and zero when there is no uptake selectivity.

The overlooked (i.e., used but not properly cited) production was estimated from the ratio of papers found by querying titles, keywords and abstracts, and papers found by querying literature citations. Low numbers mean that most indexed papers using certain information get it mostly from other indexed papers and there is little uptake from non-mainstream sources.

RESULTS

Data were available for about 9 million (WoS), 16 million (SC), and 23 million (GS) records, of which about 100,000 were used as the analytical sample.

GS revealed a flow of focal scholarly products growing at different rates. Detected GBIF output grew exponentially, doubling every 2.9 years, while TDWG and SPNHC have remained approximately constant over the last decade at about 375 and 76 documents per year, respectively (Fig. 1). However, the fraction of indexed output is tiny: 0.5% for TDWG since 2000 (0.8% overall), 0.8%–1% for SPNHC, and 3.9%–3.4% for DwC. GBIF has a higher proportion at 4.9% (recent) and 8.2% (overall). Related products have a recent 5.6% indexed share (6.7% overall), but they are all in stark contrast to other research areas: 62.4% (61.2%) for general concepts, 34.0% (61.2%) for taxonomical terms, and 38.8% (31.6%) for the selected outgroups (Fig. 2).

The leverage showed a marked difference between focal and related areas, and general areas. TDWG, SPNHC and taxonomical databases had strong indexed leverage: their documents were overly cited in indexed literature. GBIF and standards citations were biased otherwise, being preferentially cited in unindexed literature but less so than all of the comparison terms (except Bioinformatics, neutral) (Fig. 3).

While almost one-fourth of Scopus-indexed TDWG literature came from conference papers, these tended to be cited in SC-indexed articles rather than other conference papers in a 1:4 ratio. GBIF or DwC showed a more similar distribution of main types (articles, book chapters, conference papers, reviews) between published documents and cited documents.

A reasonable conclusion is that despite the low proportion of indexed publications by TDWG, SPNHC or GBIF, their products are indeed uptaken by indexed publications, and comparatively much more so than in other areas. Thus, the scientific or technical production by those organizations does have a recognizable impact and should safely be considered de facto part of the mainstream scientific endeavor.