Dataset on Editors and Editorial Boards of Scholarly Journals

In this short article, I will show you how to get datasets on the editors and editorial boards members of scholarly journals.

In this blog post, I am going to share with you interesting scholarly communications datasets on editors.

Here, I will walk you through the Open Editors, one of the largest publicly available source of datasets on journal editors and editorial members.

The Open Editors collects data about scholarly journals’ editors and editorial board members through web scrapping.

Recently, scholarly article metadata are publicly available due to some orgizations like Crossref, ROR and ORCID.

As you know, ORCID provides an ORCID iD that you own and control, it distinguishes you from every other researcher.

Some other initiatives like Intitative for Open Citations (I4OC) and  Initative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) also play an important role to make the scholarly article metadata available.

In addition to that, we have to face some challenges for open, structured, stable and machine enables metadata.

In order to meet the present criteria, many times we use web scrapping method for obtaining the datasets.

Owing to a lack of alternatives, web scraping is used to create datasets.

There are still some fascinating areas of research where there is a lack of good free, organised, and machine-readable data, forcing us to rely on time-consuming web scraping.

Pacher, Andreas, Tamara Heck and Kerstin Schoch have generated dateset through the web scrapping method.

Here is an example with the query “University of Salzburg” :

If you want to perform advance search then you can use use AND, OR, NOT, parentheses, and “quotation marks”.

In the above picture, we have searched for University of Salzburg in the dataset.

As you see, 104 results have been found. You can download the entire file as CSV on your local machine.

The authors of the dataset has also released a preprint describing their work – Open Editors: A Dataset of Scholarly Journals’ Editorial Board Positions.

At present, only the journals of the following 22 publishers  have been considered:

If you wish to attribute the original data-collection to Open Editors, you include the following reference: