SWJ: 5 years in, most cited papers

It was just about 5 years ago, when the Semantic Web journal was launched, and a bit over 4 years that the first issue appeared. So it’s perhaps a good point in time to look back and reflect a bit on what happened.

First of all, our non-standard (open and transparent) review process simply worked out. It was an experiment, of course, with unclear outcome, although we were rather confident from the start that it would work fine. In the meantime our setting continues to be discussed, and even copied sometimes.

As a journal, we have also continued to push non-standard paper types, such as those for tools and systems, for surveys, or for linked dataset papers, which we consider important for the progress of our field, but which often do not find adequate publication outlets elsewhere. We have received numerous such submissions, and some of them are among the most cited papers in our journal.

The support we received from the research community was breathtaking. Numerous editorial board members and guest editors contributed, and we are grateful for all the high-quality reviews we received from the many hundreds of reviewers who have helped.

The effort of the community around the journal is also reflected in the high quality of our papers. SCImago has recently ranked us 18th world-wide among computer science journals. Google Scholar citation counts, which everybody can check of course, show us competitively on shared top of the field.

We are particularly thankful for the contributors, the paper authors who have decided to send their paper to the journal in the initial years, when the high quality of the journal still needed to be established and quantitative measures were not yet available. Some of these early papers became highly visible and cited.

Using Google Scholar, our 10 most cited papers (of all time) are the following, in descending order – please take into account that older papers of course had more time to accumulate citations (and we apologize to the authors of the 11th most cited paper, and the 12th, …)

  1. Matthew Horridge, Sean Bechhofer, The OWL API: A Java API for OWL Ontologies, Semantic Web 2(1), 2011, 11-21.
  2. Barry Bishop, Atanas Kiryakov, Damyan Ognyanoff, Zdravko Tashev, and Ruslan Velkov, OWLIM: A family of scalable semantic repositories, Semantic Web 2(1), 2011, 33-42.
  3. Jens Lehmann, Robert Isele, Max Jakob, Anja Jentzsch, Dimitris Kontokostas, Pablo N. Mendes, Sebastian Hellmann, Mohamed Morsey, Patrick van Kleef, Sören Auer, Christian Bizer, DBpedia - A Large-scale, Multilingual Knowledge Base Extracted from Wikipedia, Semantic Web 6(2), 2015, 167-195.
  4. Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Domenico Lembo, Maurizio Lenzerini, Antonella Poggi, Mariano Rodriguez-Muro, Riccardo Rosati, Marco Ruzzi and Domenico Fabio Savo, The Mastro System for Ontology-based Data Access, Semantic Web 2(1), 2011, 43-53.
  5. Jérôme David, Jérôme Euzenat, François Scharffe and Cássia Trojahn dos Santos, The Alignment API 4.0, Semantic Web 2(1), 2011, 3-10.
  6. Claus Stadler, Jens Lehmann, Konrad Höffner, and Sören Auer, LinkedGeoData: A Core for a Web of Spatial Open Data, Semantic Web 3(4), 2012, 333-354.
  7. Aba-Sah Dadzie and Matthew Rowe, Approaches to Visualising Linked Data: A Survey,Semantic Web 2(2), 2011, 89-124.
  8. Kathrin Dentler, Ronald Cornet, Annette ten Teije and Nicolette de Keizer, Comparison of Reasoners for large Ontologies in the OWL 2 EL Profile, Semantic Web 2(2), 2011, 71-87.
  9. Vanessa Lopez, Victoria Uren, Marta Sabou, Enrico Motta, Is Question Answering fit for the Semantic Web?: a Survey, Semantic Web 2(2), 2011, 125-155.
  10. Vanessa Lopez, Miriam Fernández, Enrico Motta, Nico Stieler, PowerAqua: supporting users in querying and exploring the Semantic Web content, Semantic Web 3(3), 2012, 249-265.

In terms of average number of citations per year, the list looks only slightly different, as follows.

  1. Jens Lehmann, Robert Isele, Max Jakob, Anja Jentzsch, Dimitris Kontokostas, Pablo N. Mendes, Sebastian Hellmann, Mohamed Morsey, Patrick van Kleef, Sören Auer, Christian Bizer, DBpedia - A Large-scale, Multilingual Knowledge Base Extracted from Wikipedia, Semantic Web 6(2), 2015, 167-195.
  2. Matthew Horridge, Sean Bechhofer, The OWL API: A Java API for OWL Ontologies, Semantic Web 2(1), 2011, 11-21.
  3. Barry Bishop, Atanas Kiryakov, Damyan Ognyanoff, Zdravko Tashev, and Ruslan Velkov, OWLIM: A family of scalable semantic repositories, Semantic Web 2(1), 2011, 33-42.
  4. Kalina Bontcheva, Dominic Rout, Making Sense of Social Media Streams through Semantics: a Survey, Semantic Web 5(5), 2014, 373-403.
  5. Claus Stadler, Jens Lehmann, Konrad Höffner, and Sören Auer, LinkedGeoData: A Core for a Web of Spatial Open Data, Semantic Web 3(4), 2012, 333-354.
  6. Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Domenico Lembo, Maurizio Lenzerini, Antonella Poggi, Mariano Rodriguez-Muro, Riccardo Rosati, Marco Ruzzi and Domenico Fabio Savo, The Mastro System for Ontology-based Data Access, Semantic Web 2(1), 2011, 43-53.
  7. Tania Tudorache, Csongor Nyulas, Natalya F. Noy, Mark A. Musen, WebProtégé: A Distributed Ontology Editor and Knowledge Acquisition Tool for the Web, Semantic Web 4(1), 2013, 89-99.
  8. Jérôme David, Jérôme Euzenat, François Scharffe and Cássia Trojahn dos Santos, The Alignment API 4.0, Semantic Web 2(1), 2011, 3-10.
  9. Aba-Sah Dadzie and Matthew Rowe, Approaches to Visualising Linked Data: A Survey, Semantic Web 2(2), 2011, 89-124.
  10. Vanessa Lopez, Miriam Fernández, Enrico Motta, Nico Stieler, PowerAqua: supporting users in querying and exploring the Semantic Web content, Semantic Web 3(3), 2012, 249-265.

We congratulate all authors!