I've released a simple search engine for publications in Wikidata. Wikicite Search takes its name from the WikiCite project, which was an initiative to create a bibliographic database in Wikidata. Since bibliographic data is a core component of taxonomic research (arguably taxonomy is mostly tracing the fate of the "tags" we call taxonomic names) I've spent some time getting taxonomic literature into Wikidata. Since there are bots already adding articles by harvesting sources such as CrossRef and PubMed, I've focussed on literature that is harder to add, such as articles with non-CrossRef DOIs, or those without DOIs at all.
Once you have a big database, you are then faced with the challenge of finding things in that database. Wikidata supports generic search, but I wanted something more closely geared to bibliographic data. Hence Wikicite Search. Over the last few years I've made several attempts at a bibliographic search engine, for this project I've finally settled on some basic ideas:
- The core data structure is CSL-JSON, a simple but rich JSON format for expressing bibliographic data.
- The search engine is Elasticsearch. The documents I upload include the CSL-JSON for an article, but also a simple text representation of the article. This text representation may include multiple languages if, for example, the article has a title in more than one language. This means that if an article has both English and Chinese titles you can find it searching in either language.
- The web interface is very simple: search for a term, get results. If the search term is a Wikidata identifier you get just the corresponding article, e.g. Q98715368.
- There is a reconciliation API to help match articles to the database. Paste in one citation per line and you get back matches (if found) for each citation.
- Where possible I display a link to a PDF of the article, which is typically stored in the Internet Archive or accessible via the Wayback Machine.
There are millions of publications in Wikidata, currently less than half a million are in my search engine. My focus is narrowly on eukaryote taxonomy and related topics. I will be adding more articles as time permits. I also periodically reload existing articles to capture updates to the metadata made by the Wikidata community - being a wiki the data in Wikidata is constantly evolving.
My goal is to have a simple search tool that focusses on matching citation strings. In other words, it is designed to find a reference you are looking for, rather than be a tool to search the taxonomic literature. If that sounds contradictory, consider that my tool will only find a paper about a taxon if it is explicitly named in the title. A more sophisticated search engine would support things like synonym resolution, etc.
The other reason I built this is to provide an API for accessing Wikidata items and displaying them in other formats. For example, an article in the WikiCite search engine can be retrieved in CSL-JSON format, or in RDF as JSON-LD.
As always, it's very early days. But I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that as Wikidata grows we could envisage having a search engine that includes the bulk of the taxonomic literature.
