Linked Dataset Description Papers at the Semantic Web Journal: A Critical Assessment

Since 2012, the Semantic Web journal has been accepting papers in a novel ``Linked Dataset description'' track. Here we motivate the track and provide some analysis of the papers accepted thus far. We look at the ratio of accepted papers in this time-frame that fall under this track, the relative impact of these papers in terms of citations, and we perform a technical analysis of the datasets they describe to see what sorts of resources they provide and to see if the datasets have remained available since publication. Based on a variety of such analyses, we present some lessons learnt and discuss some potential changes we could apply to the track in order to improve the overall quality of papers accepted.