Asura Enkhbayar is an Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies PhD student and data scientist at the ScholCommLab working under the supervision of Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin. He is interested in critically exploring the infrastructure of scholarly communication in the 21st century at the intersection of philosophy and technology. Following an undergraduate degree in electronics, Asura studied cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. His previous studies equipped him with the skills needed to tackle a mediatized and data-intense domain, while acknowledging the need for more qualitative work and a solid theoretical foundation. His doctoral research aims to investigate the role and impact of open infrastructure—as in the case of traditional and new research metrics, citation indices, or open access initiatives—in scholarly communication.

In his role as a data scientist he is working on a wide variety of issues related to his doctoral research, including empirical projects focusing on altmetrics, open access, and open science. Apart from collecting and analysing data, he also writes terrible research software, as expected of a proper data scientist.

Asura remains an advocate for open scholarship, contributes to Open Knowledge Maps and, most importantly, played the main role of Yu in the martial arts short-film The Dojo Part II (watch the trailer on Vimeo). You can find him on Twitter and Github.

Select Publications

Fleerackers, A., Nehring, L., Maggio, L. A., Enkhbayar, A., Moorhead, L., & Alperin, J. P. (2022). Identifying science in the news: An assessment of the precision and recall of Altmetric.com news mention data. Scientometrics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04510-7
Enkhbayar, A., Haustein, S., Barata, G., & Alperin, J. P. (2020). How much research shared on Facebook happens outside of public pages and groups? A comparison of public and private online activity around PLOS ONE papers. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(2), 749–770. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00044
Maggio, L. A., Ratcliff, C. L., Krakow, M., Moorhead, L. L., Enkhbayar, A., & Alperin, J. P. (2019). Making headlines: An analysis of US government-funded cancer research mentioned in online media. BMJ Open, 9(2), e025783. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-025783
Enkhbayar, A., & Alperin, J. P. (2018). Challenges of capturing engagement on Facebook for Altmetrics. STI 2018 Conference Proceedings, 1460–1469. http://arxiv.org/abs/1809.01194