Global scholarly information systems provide poor coverage for social science and humanities research taking place outside of the anglophone world and in languages other than English. Paul Donner, Stephan Stahlschmidt, Serhii Nazarovets, Igor Cojocaru, Irina Cojocaru, Marina Razmadze and Shushanik Sargsyan highlight a range of national initiatives taking place aimed at improving scholarly data for local and national research and argue for the value of their greater integration.

Research in the social sciences and humanities often seeks to benefit local, national, or regional communities. While international communities of researchers advance knowledge in their respective fields, a large share of social research is locally oriented, and the transfer of findings into application requires local expertise and capacities.

Global scholarly information systems, including bibliometric databases, are indispensable for international comparability, but they cannot fully capture complex realities of national research systems, such as language, institutional fragmentation, and differing research traditions. These factors, and the inherently localised orientation of social and humanistic research make national research information infrastructures indispensable. While one global research system unites scholars around the world, not all research is, or should be, globally relevant.

Much of this locally relevant scholarship, especially when published in languages other than English, is effectively invisible in international citation databases due to their indexing policies.

While one global research system unites scholars around the world, not all research is, or should be, globally relevant.

Commercial, globally oriented scholarly databases have little economic incentive to expand coverage of national literatures. However, these gaps are increasingly being filled by local initiatives, which build and develop national scholarly infrastructures. A number of European countries have reacted to this situation by building comprehensive scholarly databases, particularly for humanities and social sciences research, such as VABB-SHW in Flanders (Belgium) or PBM in Poland.

High-quality, comprehensive, open data for national research

The utility and trustworthiness of research information systems, whether local or global, depend on high-quality data about scholarly outputs. Yet, both commercial and non-profit international databases struggle with data accuracy, coverage, and transparency. This is due to their being either overly centralised, or in the case of grassroots initiatives struggling to coordinate the sheer number of entities involved: publishers, funders, individual researchers or research organisations.

Local intermediate infrastructures, with their focused scope, expertise on national research systems and embeddedness in regional contexts, are well-positioned to address these challenges. They are best placed to produce open, interoperable, and high-quality bibliographic data on the diverse range of research outputs. Their proximity to the sources of scholarly output enables them to ensure completeness, disambiguation, interoperability, and metadata richness, especially for non-English research.

Across Europe and its neighbouring regions, a growing number of national initiatives are taking shape to ensure that local research is becoming more visible and accessible, often with open and high-quality data. The following examples from members of a networking project of national scholarly infrastructures illustrate such initiatives.

Moldova

An international indexing service may struggle to evaluate the level of scholarship of a Romanian-language archaeology journal from Moldova. Yet, a local panel of experts does this routinely, offering a culturally and academically informed assessment. Their evaluations, like those included in the National Bibliometric Instrument of Moldova, help guide local researchers and policymakers.

Germany

A centrally curated database, either open or closed, can hardly be expected to correctly reflect the intricacies of the structure of research institutions across numerous countries. High-quality research organisation name disambiguation on a country-scale is difficult, but certainly possible, for local experts working within these systems. Insufficient performance of institution disambiguation in commercial bibliometric databases pushed German scholars to develop their own add-on system.

Ukraine

In Ukraine, fragmented databases such as Ukrainika Naukova, the National Repository of Academic Texts, or the Open Ukrainian Citation Index (OUCI) illustrate both the progress and the challenges of building an integrated national bibliometric system. Recent analyses of the Ukrainian arts and humanities in Scopus show that much of the national scholarship, especially in Ukrainian-language journals, remains invisible in global databases, highlighting the need for open, interoperable infrastructures developed by local experts.

Armenia

Since independence in 1991, only a limited share of Armenian researchers’ output (about 25,000 publications, or roughly 20–25% of national research) has appeared in journals indexed by Web of Science (WoS) and/or Scopus, meaning most scientific knowledge produced and disseminated in Armenia has remained invisible to the international scholarly community. To counter this the Center for Scientific Information Analysis and Monitoring began work on the Armenian Science Citation Index (ASCI) in 2012. Today, ASCI offers a repository of approximately 26,000 publications and 360,000 citations, covering 72 of 125 local scientific journals that provide full texts for indexing—a distinctive feature that enables extraction of citation contexts from snippets and offers capabilities unmatched elsewhere.

Georgia

In Georgia, the need for local expertise and dedicated infrastructures is addressed by the Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (TECHINFORMI), which plays a central role in documenting and analysing nationally relevant research. Since 2000, TECHINFORMI of the Georgian Technical University has developed national-purpose bilingual databases that systematically describe the scientific landscape of Georgia. These databases document Georgian scientific publications, research projects, researchers, expert communities, innovations, and scientific organisations, providing a comprehensive and locally grounded representation of national research activities that is largely absent from international bibliometric systems. By combining detailed local knowledge with standardised scientometric and bibliometric methodologies, TECHINFORMI provides country-level analyses for governmental bodies and research institutions, supporting evidence-based research evaluation and science policy.

A future of networked local infrastructures

The biggest advantage of national infrastructures is simultaneously their biggest disadvantage: They are locally ingrained, and so far most of their data remains local. 

We envision a future in which actors responsible for local infrastructures coordinate and network globally, using common interoperable standards for data exchange. Building on a data backend provided by decentrally run local initiatives, integrating frontend platforms can be constructed that incorporate content from these independent, but harmonised sources. This model is already partly realised in the Ibero-American SciELO system. The goal is not to replace global infrastructures, but to complement them with verified, context-rich data. A federated “network of networks” could allow OpenAlex or OpenCitations to harvest and credit national sources. It would also face a number of significant challenges, including coordination of development efforts, interoperability, harmonisation, and deduplication of data.

Locally grounded infrastructures are not only tools for research assessment, they are expressions of data sovereignty and collective responsibility.

The key benefits of such an integrated system of local-source components are unbiased and focused coverage, data quality, and, likely, open and transparent data. Beyond this, many potential future applications become possible, such as revealing the cases where initially localised research efforts spill over to the global science system or are re-localised – taken up and developed further in other places. The tracking of countries’ diaspora researchers, crucial bridge builders for research cooperation, may become much easier. Linked local initiatives can thus foster not only regional visibility, but also global connectivity.

National and local scholarly infrastructures already play a vital, but globally unrecognised role in enabling meaningful research impact within their own contexts and, increasingly, across borders. As the scholarly information ecosystem becomes more inclusive, a network of these infrastructures will be essential for capturing and disseminating diverse contributions. Locally grounded infrastructures are not only tools for research assessment, they are expressions of data sovereignty and collective responsibility. Supporting them means making the global research system more equitable, transparent, and inclusive.

Realising this vision will require continued bottom-up coordination, capacity-building, and investment. Encouragingly, this work is already underway in many parts of the world. What is needed now is greater recognition and support for these efforts by funders, governments, and global research institutions.

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