SciCrunch


SciCrunch is a collaboratively edited knowledge base about scientific resources, a community 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, which can be used in scientific publications. In some respect, it is for science and scholarly publishing, what Wikidata is for Wikimedia Foundation projects. Hosted by the University 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

Research Resource Identifiers

Research Resource Identifiers are supposed to be resource identifiers which are globally unique and persistent.
They were introduced and are promoted by the Resource Identification Initiative.
Resources in this context are research resources like reagents, tools or materials.
An example for such a resource would be a cell line used in an experiment or software tool used in a computational analysis.
The Resource Identification Portal was created in support of this initiative and is a central service where these identifiers can be searched and created. These identifiers should be fully searchable by data mining unlike supplementary files, and can be updated to new versions as basic methodology changes over time.

Format for RRID citations

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.

Institutions and publishers recommending use of RRIDs

A number of publishing houses, initiatives and research institutions encourage using SciCrunch‘s RRIDs: