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Ruben Verborgh

The Claims Network: Collecting Research, Education, Impact, and Leadership Claims on the Decentralized Web

Patrick Hochstenbach, Herbert Van de Sompel, and Ruben Verborgh

Common research assessment approaches rely heavily on data pertaining to traditional contributions to the research endeavor (R), including the number of journal articles published, the journals in which those articles are published, and the citations the articles or journals receive. Dissatisfaction with these approaches has led to a global call for alternatives that take a much wider range of contributions into account, including those in areas such as Education (E), societal impact (I), and academic leadership (L). While traditional research outputs are relatively easy to track, thanks to their publication in a finite set of dedicated scholarly venues, non-traditional REIL contributions are typically disseminated across the broader web. This includes outputs such as research data, software, reports, courses, live performances, interviews, and committee leadership, making their discovery and collection far from straightforward. In an attempt to devise a scalable, automated approach to tackle this “find the REIL needles in the web haystack” problem, we introduce the Claims Network approach, which collects information about REIL contributions by inviting researchers to post about them on the distributed Mastodon social media environment. Through a prototype developed around the academic Mastodon instance operated by SURF in the Netherlands, we demonstrate that the approach is feasible and can be extended to include other Mastodon instances, both academic and general-purpose.

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Published in 2025 in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{hochstenbach_tpdl_2025,
  author = {Hochstenbach, Patrick and Van de Sompel, Herbert and Verborgh, Ruben},
  title = {The Claims Network: Collecting Research, Education, Impact, and Leadership Claims on the Decentralized {Web}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries},
  editor = {Balke, Wolf-Tilo and Golub, Koraljka and Manolopoulos, Yannis and Stefanidis, Kostas and Zhang, Zheying},
  year = 2025,
  month = sep,
  pages = {163--180},
  series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  volume = 16097,
  publisher = {Springer},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-032-05409-8_11},
  url = {https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-05409-8_11},
}

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ACM
Patrick Hochstenbach, Herbert Van de Sompel, and Ruben Verborgh. 2025. The Claims Network: Collecting Research, Education, Impact, and Leadership Claims on the Decentralized Web. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Springer, 163–180.
APA
Hochstenbach, P., Van de Sompel, H., & Verborgh, R. (2025). The Claims Network: Collecting Research, Education, Impact, and Leadership Claims on the Decentralized Web. In W.-T. Balke, K. Golub, Y. Manolopoulos, K. Stefanidis, & Z. Zhang (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (Vol. 16097, pp. 163–180). Springer.
IEEE
P. Hochstenbach, H. Van de Sompel, and R. Verborgh, “The Claims Network: Collecting Research, Education, Impact, and Leadership Claims on the Decentralized Web,” in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, 2025, vol. 16097, pp. 163–180.
LNCS
Hochstenbach, P., Van de Sompel, H., Verborgh, R.: The Claims Network: Collecting Research, Education, Impact, and Leadership Claims on the Decentralized Web. In: Balke, W.-T., Golub, K., Manolopoulos, Y., Stefanidis, K., and Zhang, Z. (eds.) Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. pp. 163–180. Springer (2025).
MLA
Hochstenbach, Patrick, et al. “The Claims Network: Collecting Research, Education, Impact, and Leadership Claims on the Decentralized Web.” Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, edited by Wolf-Tilo Balke et al., vol. 16097, Springer, 2025, pp. 163–80.