Literature reviews are an invaluable asset in communication science to bring work from different approaches (e.g., linguistics, political science, psychology) together. Such reviews, however, require a lot of work to be compiled and are quickly outdated. Unfortunately, there are no incentives or systems in place to keep them updated, which would also be a very difficult and time-consuming task given the narrative paper format in which they are published.
The concept and technology of nanopublications could help researchers with these problems. Nanopublications are a container format to publish scientific (and other) statements as small pieces of Linked Data. This project investigates whether nanopublications yield us with machine-interpretable, interoperable, and easily updatable literature reviews in communication science. To do so, we will develop a general model for literature reviews in communication science, and then apply it on a concrete case from an existing literature review. We will thereby demonstrate how this allows for literature reviews that are “living” in the sense that they can be kept up-to-date in a manner that is user-friendly, open, and provenance-aware.

Supervisors: Tobias Kuhn & Mickey Steijaert