Mapping the unmapped citation landscape: how crowdsourcing will fill the citation gap

This presentation examines the critical issue of citation invisibility in scholarly publishing, particularly affecting journals in the Global South. The research reveals that among 52,000+ Open Journal Systems (OJS) journals worldwide, 79.9% are located in the Global South, with 98.8% remaining invisible to Web of Science and 94.3% invisible to Scopus. Despite this invisibility, the vast majority of these journals are legitimate scholarly publications rather than predatory journals.

The presentation introduces a collaborative solution developed through a partnership between OpenCitations, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), and the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology. This initiative implements a seamless citation submission workflow integrated into OJS, enabling automatic submission of structured bibliographic metadata and citation relationships to OpenCitations through GitHub issues. The system employs a validation pipeline encompassing structural, semantic, and closure validation processes.

The technical implementation utilizes CSV formats for bibliographic metadata and citation relationships, with monthly data ingestion cycles. Unlike existing predatory journal lists, the project emphasizes transparency and accountability through board governance and published evaluation criteria. The infrastructure maintains independence from proprietary platforms, utilizing OpenCitations APIs, Zenodo for permanent archival, and GitHub for workflow visibility.

The potential global impact includes connecting 41,500 Global South journals and introducing millions of new citations into the global citations network, effectively democratizing the entire citation landscape.

Presented at csv,conf,v9 in Bologna, Italy, on September 10, 2025.