While a wide range of scholarly information becomes available online and standardized, the sheer volume and diversifying content types make it challenging to structure the data for cross-analysis. In recent years, new scholarly databases are being released attempting to overcome such challenges by leveraging natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, or automating the metadata acquisition process. This article offers an overview of the factors enabling the new breed of databases with selected examples to discusses how such new tools would influence the future of the scholarly information market.

Recently institutional research (IR for short) has been a hot topic in the context of Japanese higher education and Japanese research institutes. This article as a commentary from a practitioner of IR clarifies the significance and definition of IR, domestic and foreign state-of-art of IR and the practical method and framework of IR. Basically IR has been conducted in the United States as a function to check validness of investment to higher education institutions over fifty years. From the beginning of the century, in Japan, IR is greatly expected that it will be a powerful tool for governance of universities. In this article, author shows the state-of-art of Japanese institutional research and its anticipated roles.

This paper provides an overview of author identifiers that have been generally used and continuously invented for scholarly and cultural databases in today’s technical changing and political movement. It functions as to eliminate the author name ambiguity and to make the exact authors relate to their works of all academic and cultural creations. At first, the author identifier is formally described in comparing to the author name disambiguation method. Currently used and important author identifiers are introduced and examined from the viewpoint of the quality issues. Then, it is illustrated how the global author identifiers, i.e., ORCID and ISNI are applied to the databases of academic papers, research data, and digital archives respectively.