Domain terms that appear in the data, the schema or the UI and may not be immediately obvious to a non-specialist reader.
DBLP. The Digital Bibliography & Library Project — a computer
science bibliography from the University of Trier, indexing journals,
conferences, books and other publications since 1993. Source for the
two fact_*_articles tables. Site: https://dblp.org.
Scimago / SJR. Scimago Journal Rank — a journal-level prestige metric based on the eigenvector centrality of citations, weighted by the citing journals' own SJR. Higher is better, no upper bound. Backed by Elsevier Scopus data. We obtain SJR plus eight more metrics per journal from a Kaggle dump.
iCore / CORE2026. The Computing Research and Education Association
of Australasia (CORE) maintains a public ranking of computing
conferences. Tiers run A*, A, B, C and Multiconference from
top to bottom. Site: http://portal.core.edu.au/conf-ranks/.
Kaggle. Public dataset platform. The Scimago dump we ingest was published there: "Journal Rankings" by Khaled-El-Sayed.
Lookup table. A dimension table that contains the conformed,
unique entities of one type. Example: lookup_journals is the
single-version-of-truth for the 1 423 journals in the corpus.
Fact table. A table whose rows represent individual events or
measurements at the lowest grain of analysis. Example:
fact_journal_articles — one row per article ever published in any
indexed journal.
Bridge table. Resolves an N-to-N relationship between a fact row
and a dimension. bridge_journal_article_authors connects an article
to each of its authors with a composite primary key.
Star schema. Kimball dimensional model: a small number of fact tables surrounded by dimension/lookup tables. The opposite of a snowflake schema (further normalisation of dimensions). Optimised for analytical reads.
Wide dimension. A dimension table that absorbs the attributes of the entity it represents — even if some attributes are sparsely populated — rather than splitting them across normalised sub-tables. Trade-off: faster reads, slightly larger per-row storage.
Materialised table. A regular CREATE TABLE whose contents are
populated from a SELECT over views. Acts as a cached snapshot of an
expensive aggregate. Read-only between rebuilds. The pattern used
throughout sql_scripts/03_views.sql for the heavy aggregates.
Rejection log. Quarantine table for rows that fail validation during ETL. Captures source file, source id, reason and the raw row as JSON, so failures are visible and recoverable.
Best quartile. Categorical Q1 – Q4 ranking of the journal
relative to all journals in its best_subject_area. Q1 = top 25 %.
Best subject area. The subject category where the journal has its strongest position (highest quartile). Each journal can appear in several subject areas; the "best" is what the UI uses.
H-index. The largest integer h such that the journal has published at least h papers cited h or more times. Resists single-paper outliers; favours sustained productivity.
Cite score. Average citations per article over the last 4 years.
Total docs / total docs 3y. Number of indexed documents ever / in the last 3 years.
Total refs. Total references contained in articles published in the journal.
Total cites 3y. Total citations the journal received in the last 3 years.
Citable docs 3y. Documents counted as citable in the 3-year window (research articles, reviews; excludes editorials, errata, etc.).
Cites per doc 2y. Citations per article in the last 2 years — the building block of Journal Impact Factor.
Refs per doc. Average reference count per article. Higher in review-heavy journals.
Acronym. The short form (e.g. EDBT, VLDB) used by DBLP as
booktitle. Acronym → iCore is the strict entity-resolution edge.
Rank value. The iCore tier (A* to Multiconference).
Primary FoR. Australian Field of Research code that classifies
the conference's topic. The code is opaque (e.g. 4605) but each one
has a human description (e.g. "Distributed and parallel computing").
The lookup_field_of_research_categories table maps codes to
descriptions.
RFC 7807 Problem Details. Standard JSON shape for HTTP error
responses (application/problem+json). Fields: type, title,
status, detail, instance. Used by every error path of the API.
Stale-while-revalidate (SWR). Caching strategy where a stale cache
entry is served immediately while the fetch refreshes it in the
background. TanStack Query implements this with staleTime and
gcTime.
Visx. Airbnb's collection of low-level visualisation primitives that wrap D3 scales, shapes and axes as React components. Trade-off vs Recharts/Chart.js: more code to write, but pixel-perfect control.
Voronoi nearest-x overlay. Hover-detection layer that maps each
mouse position to the nearest data point in X without forcing the
cursor onto a tiny marker. Implemented in LineChart.tsx.
Drag-to-zoom. Brush interaction where dragging across the X axis selects a new view window. Implemented client-side; the data array is sliced, not re-fetched.
Path / search params. TanStack Router treats route parameters
(e.g. $journalId) and URL search parameters (?start_year=…) as
typed, schema-validated inputs. Filters live in the URL, so every
page state is shareable.