Extracting, Evaluating, and Enhancing Metadata for Institutional Researchers in Wikidata

Open, non-proprietary persistent identifiers and their associated metadata are invaluable sources of information regarding researchers, research products, and research impact. Our project made use of ORCID iDs and Wikidata QIDs to identify researchers at our institution who have a Wikidata profile. We searched the Wikidata database and extracted QIDs that had an ORCID iD from one of our researchers listed as an external identifier. Next, we extracted metadata from each researcher’s QID, resulting in a list of contributed properties and values. We processed these data, focusing on verifying that individuals were correctly affiliated with our institution, determining frequently occurring properties and values, and selecting properties that would be valuable to add to Wikidata entries. Our institution has a Research Information Management System that provides researchers with an institutional profile containing information about their publications, teaching, and other scholarly endeavors. We plan to create a custom property in Wikidata that will enable us to add a new external identifier to researchers’ Wikidata profiles that links back to their institutional profile. This conference proceeding will overview our methods for extracting Wikidata metadata, the data cleaning and verification process, and the progress we have made in contributing new information to researchers’ Wikidata profiles.