Fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue and credit attribution practices through Science Explorer, a digital library that tracks impact of literature, software and data

The NASA-funded Science Explorer (SciX) is an open, curated information discovery platform for Earth and space science providing trusted access to interdisciplinary scientific resources. Developed as an extension of the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a cornerstone of scholarly communication in astrophysics, SciX is designed to serve a broader scientific community, with a strong focus on supporting Earth science research, applications, and societal decision-making.

 

At the heart of SciX is a carefully curated database, where all indexed content (literature, datasets, and software) is sourced from reputable, authoritative providers. This ensures that users engage only with credible scientific information, making SciX a trusted environment for

discovery and decision support. The system integrates peer-reviewed research, preprints, conference and meeting abstracts, funded projects, mission and archival datasets, and software tools across domains, fostering connections between Earth and space sciences. This multidisciplinarity is essential for addressing complex societal challenges such as climate adaptation, disaster resilience, as well as larger research questions such as the origin of the solar system and the presence of life in the universe. The key ingredient that SciX is providing is a unified and precise, full-text search across these curated resources. We discuss our efforts to enrich these resources with common disciplinary and cross-disciplinary controlled vocabularies

to enhance findability and cross-disciplinary dialogue.

 

We also discuss our efforts to build a knowledge graph at SciX that connects the literature and the data and software resources, exposing the use of data and software in research and tracking the impact of these resources. In doing so, we hope to facilitate a cultural shift in the Earth and space science communities to streamline adoption of data and software citations, and to better align academic incentives with FAIR practices that have broad societal impact, such as metadata transparency, and resource accessibility and reuse.