SciCrunch is a collaboratively editedknowledge base about scientific resources. It is acommunity portal for researchers and a content management system for data and databases. It is intended to provide a common source of data to the research community and the data about Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs), which can be used inscientific publications. After starting as a pilot of two journals in 2014, by 2022 over 1,000 journals have been using them and over half a million RRIDs have been quoted in the scientific literature.[1] In some respect, it is for science and scholarly publishing, similar to whatWikidata is forWikimedia Foundation projects. Hosted by theUniversity of California, San Diego, SciCrunch was also designed to help communities of researchers create their own portals to provide access to resources,databases and tools of relevance to their research areas[2]
Research Resource Identifiers (RRID) are globally unique and persistent.[3]They were introduced and are promoted by theResource Identification Initiative.[3]Resources in this context are research resources like reagents, tools or materials.[3][4]An example for such a resource would be acell line used in an experiment orsoftware tool used in a computational analysis.TheResource Identification Portal (https://scicrunch.org/resources) was created in support of this initiative and is a central service where these identifiers can be searched and created.[3][5] These identifiers should be fully searchable bydata mining unlike supplementary files, and can be updated to new versions as basic methodology changes over time.
The recommendation for citing research resources is shown below for key biological resources:
The Resource Identification Portal lists existing RRIDs and instructions for creating a new one if an RRID matching the resource does not already exist.
Description:Each RRID contains an ID, a type, a URL, and a name. There are hundreds of other attributes but most are specific to the type, for example antibody type RRIDs include an attribute called clonality, denoting whether the reagent is monoclonal or polyclonal, while cell lines have an attribute of "parental cell line" denoting the origin of the cell line being described.
RRID Citations:RRIDs denote those research resources that have been used in the conduct of a study. They are not intended to be casual citations. RRIDs that have been used in scientific papers have been mined from the literature using both automated tools[6] and semi-automated tools thanks to a partnership withHypothes.is. The data that defines which paper cites a particular RRID is usually available on the resolver page for that RRID, for example:https://scicrunch.org/resolver/CVCL_0038 shows the list of 44 papers (as of April 11, 2023) that have used this cell line in research. Each reference will show how authors have used the RRID by including a short snippet of the sentence in which the resource is defined by authors.
External Resolver Services for RRIDs:Name to thing resolver from theCalifornia Digital Library can resolve any RRID using the following patternhttps://n2t.net/[RRID]examplehttps://n2t.net/RRID:NXR_1049
TheIdentifiers.org resolver can also resolve any RRID using the following patternhttps://identifiers.org/RRID/[RRID]examplehttps://identifiers.org/RRID/RRID:NXR_1049
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A number of publishing houses, initiatives, andresearch institutions encourage using SciCrunch's RRIDs:Common Citation Format Article in Nature,[7]Cell Press,eLife,FORCE11,Frontiers Media,[8]GigaScience,[9]MIRIAM Registry,[10]NIH,[11]PLOS Biology andPLOS Genetics.[12]
