What is 'the scholarly record'?

Originally published on eve.gd on 26 July 2022, last updated 6 September 2026.

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What is “the scholarly record”? There is some work on this already. For instance, Dougherty, M. V., ‘Defining the Scholarly Record’, in Correcting the Scholarly Record for Research Integrity: In the Aftermath of Plagiarism, ed. by M. V. Dougherty, Research Ethics Forum (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), pp. 19–57 gives the following abstract:

Defining the Scholarly Record

This chapter provides a conceptualization of the scholarly record. I propose that items that belong indisputably to the scholarly record meet six hallmarks: the Knowledge, Authorship, Publication, Library, Database, and Discipline conditions. Books issued by scholarly presses and articles appearing in established journals have been the traditional formats for presenting research findings, and such items clearly meet these six conditions. Advances in technology, however, have occasioned new modes for recording and disseminating knowledge, and they create challenges to the long-standing conceptualizations of the scholarly record. Online post-publication review venues, open-access initiatives, interactive scholarly websites, online document repositories, and other venues invite a reconsideration of the precise boundary of the published literature. I distinguish between synchronic and diachronic approaches to the scholarly record. Separating these two allows one to isolate the scholarly record as a present system from past versions that have operated under different parameters and also from future versions that are only anticipated.

I was idly thinking about the characteristics of this term somewhat more broadly and came up with the following assertions:

• The scholarly record is a decentralized network of evolving truth assertions
• The evolving truth assertions can be plotted as a network graph connected by different edges
• One edge that connects each assertion is a citation, linking one entity to another
• Another edge type is shared authorship or institution
• Another edge type is academic affiliation
• Whether a truth assertion is part of the scholarly record is determined by another set of distributed assertions and their power configurations (say, through institutional affiliation) of the individuals who make such assertions
• That is: who says that something is a “matter of scholarly record” matters
• These assertions appear in peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed venues
• Parts of the graph interconnect with one another via citation, authorship overlap and so on, but other segments of this record remain totally isolated from one another
• The scholarly record includes digital and non-digital items
• The scholarly record includes artifacts that require people to pay and artifacts that are openly accessible
• It includes artifacts that are openly licensed and can be modified and those that are under strict copyright
• It includes references to artifacts that never existed or were never accessible, artifacts that were but are no longer accessible, artifacts that are confidential, artifacts that do not exist YET, and artifacts that have been “retracted”
• Controversially, as with any digitally preserved artifact, it is possible for the scholarly record also to contain malware and digital historians are split on whether these should be preserved
• It is changing in the addition of new forms: software, datasets, social media conversations
• This poses new challenges for digital preservation and access
• If you have to make digitally available and preserve arbitrary-sized objects over an indefinite time period, this is a substantial change from previous systems confined to “journal articles” or similarly limited forms
• There are also challenges of addressability; is it enough to give a single, say, DOI for a document, or do we require new locative markers for citing work of significant scale?

References

This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.

1. Dougherty, M. V., ‘Defining the Scholarly Record’, Research Ethics Forum, Springer International Publishing, 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99435-2_2>

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99435-2_2