Despite increasing commitments to open science, citation data in educational research remain largely fragmented, incomplete, and frequently locked behind proprietary systems. Commercial citation databases such as Web of Science and Scopus not only restrict access through subscription-based models but also provide limited coverage of educational research output (Moed, 2005). This lack of coverage is particularly pronounced for national publication contexts, such as German-language educational research, which remains underrepresented in major commercial indices (Heinze et al., 2019). In response, open database providers such as OpenAlex (Priem et al., 2022) have emerged as alternatives to commercial systems, aiming to expand disciplinary breadth and geographical inclusivity in research output coverage.

Nevertheless, educational research poses specific challenges for open citation infrastructures. The field is characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity in publication types, languages, national research traditions, and dissemination channels. Alongside journal articles, monographs, edited volumes, research reports, and practice-oriented publications play a central role in scholarly communication. However, citation data for these formats are particularly sparse or inconsistently represented in existing open infrastructures. As a consequence, citation-based discovery, bibliometric analysis, and systematic knowledge mapping in educational research remain severely constrained, limiting both analytical insight and the transparency of research evaluation processes.

To address these limitations, federated research infrastructures increasingly aim to contribute publication and reference data to an open, distributed research information ecosystem. Within this broader transformation of scholarly infrastructures, open citation data have emerged as a key component. This development is closely linked to current debates on the reform of research assessment practices, as reflected in initiatives such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) (coara.org) and the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information (barcelona-declaration.org). Complementary initiatives, including the Initiative for Open Citations (i4oc.org), specifically promote the availability of citation relationships as open, machine-readable, and interoperable data, thereby reducing structural dependencies on commercial providers.

The project Open Citation Data for Educational Research (Weimer et al., 2025) builds directly on these initiatives and aims to integrate open reference and citation data into FIS Bildung, the core reference system for educational literature in German-speaking countries. FIS Bildung cooperates with 30 partner institutions that collect, index, and curate relevant educational research publications. It is embedded within the Fachportal Pädagogik, a subject-specific search portal that provides unified access to publications from a wide range of national and international databases, including ERIC.

The following contribution introduces the OFFZIB project, outlines its conceptual and infrastructural foundations, and discusses the connectivity and effectiveness of its objectives in contributing to a sustainable European and international solution for open citation data in educational research.

In a first phase of the ongoing project, the aim is to apply open-source reference extraction tools (like Grobid, Cermine, and AnyStyle) for generating reference data from educational research publications in peDOCS, an open access repository and part of FIS Bildung. Different approaches were systematically tested on three empirically grounded document samples drawn from the peDOCS, representing different publication types and subdisciplines. The evaluation focused on reference detection accuracy, errors and the quality of extracted reference elements such as authors, titles, and source information. In a next step, the extracted data will be matched against references metadata from relevant databases, such as ERIC and OpenAlex. Based on these results, decisions are made regarding a common representation of references and their metadata, with the aim of ensuring interoperability and facilitating data sharing with other infrastructure providers. To support this process, researchers and infrastructure stakeholders in educational research are consulted in order to discuss the resulting citation data corpus and to assess its validity and usefulness for educational research evaluation and bibliometric analyses.

The OFFZIB project aims at contributing to the development of a sustainable open citation infrastructure for educational research by reducing structural dependencies on commercial platforms and expanding the coverage of reference and citation data beyond journal-centric publication models. By systematically evaluating open-source reference extraction workflows and integrating the resulting citation data into established research information systems, the project addresses core limitations in the visibility and accessibility of educational research output. The first findings demonstrate both the current potential and the remaining challenges of generating open citation data for a heterogeneous and multilingual field. Addressing these gaps is essential for enabling fairer and more transparent citation data in education. By embedding open citation data into existing infrastructures and aligning with international open science and research assessment initiatives, the project supports the long-term goal of improving the transparency, comparability, and societal relevance of educational research evaluation.

Heinze, T., Tunger, D., Fuchs, J. E., Jappe, A., & Eberhardt, P. (2019). Fachliche Forschungs- und Lehrprofile staatlicher Universitäten in Deutschland. Eine Kartierung ausgewählter Fächer. Wuppertal: BUW. https://doi.org/10.25926/9242‐ws58 Moed, H. F. (2005). Citation analysis in research evaluation. Information Science and Knowledge Management: Bd. 9. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3714-7 Priem, J., Piwowar, H. & Orr, R. (2022). OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.01833 Weimer, V., Heck, T., Schindler, C., Mayr, P., Shahid, M. A., & Oerder, T. (2025, November 19). Open Citation Data for Educational Research (OFFZIB). https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/HCKXY