About Scholar Data
Scholar Data is a platform for measuring, improving, and showcasing the impact of research datasets. It gives researchers and organizations a dedicated space to track and display how their shared datasets are being discovered, cited, and reused across the scientific community.
→ Ready to create your profile and brag about your datasets? Head straight to the Scholar Data.
Background
Despite growing adoption of data sharing in research, there has been no standardized, transparent, or equitable way to measure and reward it. Publication metrics like the h-index are well established. However, datasets, which often drive discovery just as much as papers, have been largely invisible to impact tracking.
Scholar Data is being developed as part of an NIH-organized S-index Challenge to address this gap. The platform introduces the S-index (Sharing Index), a novel metric that evaluates a researcher's data sharing impact based on dataset-level signals of FAIRness, citations, and alternative mentions.
The S-index and Scholar Data efforts are conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Bhavesh Patel, with major contributions from Sanjay Soundarajan, and support from Aaron Lee, Cecilia Lee, James O'Neill, and Aydan Gasimova. The team is one of the seven finalist teams selected for Phase 2 of the NIH S-index challenge, with results to be announced in July 2026.
What is the S-index?
The S-index is to data sharing what the h-index is to publications. It quantifies a researcher's overall data sharing footprint in a single, interpretable score. For more details, we refer to the Concepts section.
What's on the Platform?
The main purpose of Scholar Data is to allow researchers to track and showcase their data sharing impact. Create a profile, claim your datasets, and track your S-index and dataset metrics over time today! We refer to the For Researchers section for more details.
Scholar Data has many more features that could be useful to researchers, funders, data repository managers, and more. We refer to the Browse and Explore and For Repositories sections for more details.
Privacy & Transparency
Scholar Data does not track individual users beyond the information they provide.
The platform's source code is open and available in the Scholar Data GitHub repository.
Platform Status
In response to community interest, Scholar Data has officially launched in May 2026 as a full platform. What began as a public beta as part of the NIH S-index Challenge has grown into a production-ready service, with researchers actively creating profiles, claiming datasets, and tracking their data sharing impact.
The cost of running the platform is currently modest (~$200/month) and covered by Bhavesh Patel. If we win the challenge, we expect there will be funding opportunities to support the platform long term and enable further developments to increase dataset coverage and user experience.
Contact
For questions, integration support, or to contribute to development, you can either:
- Visit the GitHub repository and open an issue there
- Use our contact form