Automating bibliometric analyses using Taverna scientific workflows: A tutorial on integrating Web Services

- A scientific workflow manager was used to integrate Europe PMC Web Services.
- Workflows for bibliometric analyses were constructed in Taverna Workbench.
- These workflows were used to analyze publications and explore biomolecular networks.

Quantitative analysis of the scientific literature is a frequent task in bibliometrics. Several large online resources collect and disseminate bibliographic information, paving the way for broad analyses and statistics. The Europe PubMed Central (PMC) and its Web Services is one of these resources, providing a rich platform to retrieve information and metadata on scientific publications. However, a complete bibliometric analysis that involves gathering information and deriving statistics on an author, topic, or country is laborious when consuming Web Services on the command-line or using low level automation. In contrast, scientific workflow managers can integrate different types of software tools to automate multi-step processes. The Taverna workflow engine is a popular open-source scientific workflow manager, giving easy access to available Web Services. In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to design scientific workflows for bibliometric analyses in Taverna by integrating Europe PubMed Central Web Services and statistical analysis tools. To our knowledge, this is also the first time scientific workflow managers have been used to perform bibliometric analyses using these Web Services.