Last updated on 2026-09-25 | Edit this page
Glossary
| Term | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Author Network | SciX visualization that groups authors by co-author frequency; surveys the research landscape for a topic |
| bibstem | SciX abbreviation used for journal names and some other publication categories; it can be used as as search field |
| claiming a paper | process by which a researcher identifies themselves as one of the authors so that their ORCiD can be attached to a document that did not previously have that information |
| Concept Cloud | SciX visualization that compares frequency or uniqueness of title and abstract words against entire corpus; can be used to characterize work or to identify search terms |
| FAIR | Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reuseable, a set of principles for open data published by Wilkenson et al. in 2016 (DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2016.18) now colloquially generalized to most research artifacts. |
| ISNI | International Standard Name Identifier, a unique, persistent identifier for people and organizations of which ORCiDs are a subset |
| NASA | National Aeronautics and Space Administration |
| Open Science | “Open science is a collaborative culture enabled by technology that empowers the open sharing of data, information, and knowledge within the scientific community and the wider public to accelerate scientific research and understanding.” – NASA Open Science |
| ORCiD | Open Researcher and Contributor ID, a unique, persistent identifier for researchers |
| Paper Network | SciX visualization that groups papers by topic through their references; can focus help narrow research questions or ensure completeness of literature review |
| Review | colloquial term for an article giving a broad overview of a field and summarizing its current state, some journals focus exclusively on soliciting such contributions |
Reviews() |
SciX second-order operator that analyzes citation lists; takes a higher-level view of a topic by asking what has this contributed to |
| second-order operator | query that takes as input the output of a previous query; in SciX, these frequently operate on sets of documents |
Similar() |
SciX second-order operator that analyzes the textual similarity of documents, returning results that are similar to the input text provided whether from single or multiple papers or directly typed sample |
| UAT | Unified Astronomy Thesaurus, a open, interoperable and community-supported thesaurus for astronomy, planetary science, and heliophysics concepts adopted by SciX and other programs as a FAIR vocabulary |
Useful() |
SciX second-order operator that analyzes the reference lists; takes a nitty-gritty approach to topic by asking what are researchers actually using |
| visualization | use of graphs and other graphical elements to convey information; can be an effective way of communicating complex relationships, such as SciX Paper and Author Networks |
| UNESCO | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization |