Guest Editorial: Scholarly Big Data

The papers in this special section focus on Big Data as it applies to scholarly information - or scholarly Big Data. This represents the vast quantity of research output, which can be acquired from digital libraries, such as journal articles, conference proceedings, theses, books, patents, experimental data, etc. It also encompasses various scholarly related data, such as author demography, academic social networks, and academic activities. The abundance of scholarly data enables the study of the academic society from a big data perspective. The dynamic and diverse nature of scholarly big data requires different data management techniques and advanced data analysis methods. Therefore, emerging topics such as scholarly big data acquisition, storage, management and processing are important issues for the research community.