An open dataset of IPCC reports 'references (6th Assessment Cycle) – Version 1

We provide a first version of an open dataset of publications cited by the IPCC reports of the 6^th Assessment Cycle (Reports — IPCC)

The lists were extracted from the reference sections of three special reports and the first assessment report. [see Figure 1]. The data are presented in two formats: one on hand in text files with a list of references for each section of the reports (generally each chapter) and one other hand a structured format (json) with identifiers for the documents and the sections, the reference in string format as well as the extracted digital object identifiers (dois). In this first version, the dois extracted are mainly those which are provided in the references. The table 1 show the number of references and doi for each report.

We plan, for subsequent releases, following enhancements:

• Further quality assurance of dois. We note that some entries are provided in references of the IPCC reports without dois although they are indexed in Crossref. The table 2 shows substantial differences in doi coverage among reference sections. Spot checks of the dataset suggest that those differences are mainly due to referencing behaviour of the section’s authors rather than on type of documents cited. We aim in the next version to complete those missing dois and systematically verify the dois included in the references.
• Expand the references lists to reports from past assessment cycles

In addition, we plan a more detailed documentation of our dataflow & extraction process and to demonstrate how it can be used to create open, community curated, datasets of references of others non-scholarly documents.

The json files have each two keys (1) schema with the structure of the table and (2) data: with the records.

A simple way to read them into table is via a pandas dataframe

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_json(file_name.json, orient = ‘table’)

Acknowledgment

We thank Valentin Hancu (EC/DG ECFIN) - for fruitful discussions on the data extraction process.

Disclaimer: 

The views expressed in this paper are the author’s. They do not reflect the views or official positions of the European Commission.