Observatories

Want to increase your field’s representation in the ORKG?Only registered users of the ORKG can become members of observatories or organizations within the ORKG.

The role of an observatory is to organize research in a certain field and ensure a high quality standard. How this is done in practice is up to the Observatory and highly dependent on the research field. To maintain a flexible structure and be able to include different disciplines' requirements, we do not make strict rules on what an Observatory’s tasks are, but provide some suggestions on what Observatories could do:

  • Organize research problems in your field

  • Create state-of-the-art comparisons, descriptions of research contributions and visualizations

  • Create templates so that other researchers from your field can add contributions more easily

  • Participate in our [curation grant scheme] by sponsoring grants in the field of your observatory and mentoring grantees

  • Curate reviews and literature lists

  • Promote the ORKG in your research field

  • Build a community knowledge graph for your discipline inside the ORKG

In turn, Observatories will be prominently featured on all content pages related to their field. As ORKG comparisons receive a doi and are citable, your work will be recognized by your community. You will also be in close contact to the ORKG development team, so that your issues, wishes and feature requests will be prioritized.

You can find a list of existing Observatories here.

If you are interested in running an Observatory or if you have further questions, please contact us at info@orkg.org. We will be happy to help.

Related Questions

How can I set up an observatory in the Open Research Knowledge Graph?

To set up an Observatory for your own research, you need to get in touch with us. Please, message us via info@orkg.org and describe your plans with the observatory. Next, the following steps are required:

  1. If not already existing in the ORKG, we have to set up the organization page for your organization. We need: organization name, link to homepage, file with logo of your organization (jpeg, jpg, png, svg), list of users of the ORKG who should be members of the organization.

  2. We then need the following information for the observatory: observatory name, short description of the observatory, research field associated with the observatory (from the list of ORKG research fields), logo for the observatory (jpeg, jpg, png, svg), list of users of the ORKG who should be members of the observatory.

How can my Observatory get started?

A possible approach to get an observatory started might be to think about research questions your discipline wants to answer and how the answers can be obtained (e.g. with wich methods, materials, etc.) and where the relevant knowledge is found in existing literature. From that, a comparison can be created by adding a few papers addressing the research question by describing their contributions using a fixed set of properties (e.g. ORKG templates).

How do I assign comparisons and papers to an observatory?

If you are logged into the Open Research Knowledge Graph and you are a member of the observatory, all papers and comparisons you create are automatically assigned to your observatory.

Is it possible to link an observatory to more than one research field?

Unfortunately, not yet. You can only connect an observatory to one research field in the ORKG.

What are the benefits of running an Observatory?

As an observatory organizer you contribute to address a major issue of research by better organizing the research contributions in your field. In addition, you enjoy a number of benefits:

  • your observatory will be prominently visible in the ORKG and prominently acknowledged in all contributions

  • you will be in close touch with the development team of the ORKG and we will prioritize issues and feature requests from observatory organizers

  • you can publish comparisons with DOIs to make them citable and receive additional recognition by peer-researchers in your field

What effort is required for running an Observatory?

This of course highly depends on the kind of tasks that the Observatory aims at. We estimate that a few hours weekly might be sufficient for devising an attractive observatory. This will probably also well align with your research work. For example, you can create a comparison for describing the related work for each of the papers you publish and you can of course also involve several team members (such as PhD students and PostDocs).

What topic should I choose for an Observatory?

An Observatory should cover the key research questions in the respective field, so it should not be too large for the start. You should plan to be able to regularly update the Observatory content if new contributions in the respective field are published.

Who can be added as a member to an Observatory or Organization in the ORKG?

Only registered users of the ORKG can become members of observatories or organizations within the ORKG. Learn how to sign up here.

Who can run an Observatory?

We envision that organizations take stewardship for an Observatory who have a key role in a particular research field. This can be research institutes, groups at universities, libraries but in some cases also research projects or other initiatives having a pivotal role in a certain community.