Database Commons: A Catalog of Worldwide Biological Databases

Abstract

Biological databases serve as a global fundamental infrastructure for the worldwide scientific community, which dramatically aid the transformation of big data into knowledge discovery and drive significant innovations in a wide range of research fields. Given the rapid data production, biological databases continue to increase in size and importance. To build a catalog of worldwide biological databases, we curate a total of 5825 biological databases from 8931 publications, which are geographically distributed in 72 countries/regions and developed by 1975 institutions (as of September 20, 2022). We further devise a z-index, a novel index to characterize the scientific impact of a database, and rank all these biological databases as well as their hosting institutions and countries in terms of citation and z-index. Consequently, we present a series of statistics and trends of worldwide biological databases, yielding a global perspective to better understand their status and impact for life and health sciences. An up-to-date catalog of worldwide biological databases, as well as their curated meta-information and derived statistics, is publicly available at Database Commons (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/databasecommons/).