Database of Hungarian Scholarly Works – Bibliographical Issues
Abstract
The Database of Hungarian Scholarly Works (in Hungarian: Magyar Tudományos Művek Tára, MTMT) is a national shared bibliographic database aiming to provide an authentic, comprehensive and meaningful bibliometric tool for mapping Hungarian research output in all academic disciplines. It was launched in 2009 in order to meet the growing needs for an up-to-date evidence of scholarly publications and for tracking impact by citation data. For this purpose special bibliographic control principles were applies regarding academic requirements. The system benefits from the already existing bibliographic infrastructure in both providing (re-using) and verifying data. It relies on the collaborative work and expertise of librarians, in addition to researchers’ personal contribution who collect, input and provide entries themselves as authors.
The Bibliography Committee (BC) of MTMT is responsible for bibliographic metadata improvements. The article reviews the issues that may arise in such a national bibliometric context, that were discussed by the BC, leading to significant results and developments. Contributions included the revision and alignment of scholarly document type descriptors, originating from heterogeneous local institutional and external systems, as well as establishing the terms representing the main types of scholarly publications for a controlled vocabulary of genres/forms; the re-definition and clarification of unusual types of scientific works or contributions, e.g. the concept of collective authorship, handling works authored by many contributors, defining relator terms (descriptors for the authors’ role). The problems of bibliometric counting principles in a database which integrates monographic works, book chapters, journal articles, conference proceedings and other sources, as well as defining units and classification of citations are also presented. For verification purposes a four-level process was elaborated and put into practice. Version handling, along with functionalities such as displaying and counting aggregated rather on work- and/or expression-level than on manifestation-level are still under development. The bibliographical issues having emerged in the context of this national scholarly database represent a new and interesting challenge in transforming traditional knowledge into a new one that could support research communities
