ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

Back to Overview of Sessions

Session Details

Large-scale surveys and research data infrastructures enable research across a wide range of topics. Yet we often know surprisingly little about which topics are actually studied with particular infrastructures, how their thematic profiles differ, and how these patterns change over time. Scientific publications provide a valuable source for answering these questions: by systematically analysing scientific outputs based on survey data, research landscapes can be reconstructed and compared across infrastructures.
However, publication databases, bibliographies, and other records of scientific output often differ substantially in their coverage, metadata quality, terminology, and level of documentation. This limits our ability to identify thematic overlaps, distinctive areas of use, and changes in research agendas across survey infrastructures.
This session invites contributions that develop or apply approaches for mapping the scientific use of survey data and research infrastructures. Relevant contributions may use bibliometric, scientometric, computational, or metadata-based approaches to analyse and compare research landscapes across survey infrastructures or over time. Contributions may address the construction and harmonisation of publication databases; enrichment and linkage of heterogeneous metadata; development of common thematic classifications, controlled vocabularies, or ontologies; application of NLP, machine learning, or AI-assisted methods to classify scientific outputs; and human-in-the-loop approaches to validation and quality assurance.
We particularly welcome contributions that address the methodological challenges involved in turning heterogeneous records of scientific output into comparable evidence. By bringing together survey methodology, research data management, computational approaches, and infrastructure research, the session aims to advance methods for understanding what survey infrastructures are used to study and which research landscapes emerge around them. Such evidence can inform data stewardship, dissemination, and the further development of survey infrastructures.