Exploring Scientometrics with the OpenAIRE Graph: Introducing the OpenAIRE Beginner's Kit

The OpenAIRE Graph is an extensive resource housing diverse information on research products, including literature, datasets, and software, alongside research projects and other scholarly outputs and context. It stands as a cornerstone among contemporary research information databases, offering invaluable insights for scientometric investigations. Despite its wealth of data, its sheer size may initially appear daunting, potentially hindering its widespread adoption. To address this challenge, this paper introduces the OpenAIRE Beginner's Kit, a user-friendly solution providing access to a subset of the OpenAIRE Graph within a sandboxed environment coupled with a Jupyter notebook for analysis. The OpenAIRE Beginner's Kit is meticulously designed to democratise research and data exploration, offering accessibility from standard desktop and laptop setups. Within this paper, we provide a brief overview of the included dataset and offer guidance on leveraging the kit through a selection of illustrative queries tailored to address common scientometric inquiries.