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+# Scope
+
+The goal is to capture the "scholarly web": the graph of written works that
+cite other works. Any work that is both cited more than once and cites more
+than one other work in the catalog is very likely to be in scope. "Leaf nodes"
+and small islands of intra-cited works may or may not be in scope.
+
+Overall focus is on written works, with some exceptions. The expected core
+focus (for which we would pursue "completeness") is:
+
+    journal articles
+    academic books
+    conference proceedings
+    technical memos
+    dissertations
+    monographs
+    well-researched blog posts
+    web pages (that have citations)
+    "white papers"
+
+Possibly in scope:
+
+    reports
+    magazine articles
+    essays
+    notable mailing list postings
+    government documents
+    presentations (slides, video)
+    datasets
+    well-researched wiki pages
+    patents
+
+Probably not:
+
+    court cases and legal documents
+    newspaper articles
+    social media
+    manuals
+    datasheets
+    courses
+    published poetry
+
+Definitely not:
+
+    audio recordings
+    tv show episodes
+    musical scores
+    advertisements
+
+Author, citation, and work disambiguation would be core tasks. Linking
+pre-prints to final publication is in scope.
+
+I'm much less interested in altmetrics, funding, and grant relationships than
+most existing databases in this space.
+
+fatcat would not include any fulltext content itself, even for cleanly licensed
+(open access) works, but would have "strong" (verified) links to fulltext
+content, and would include file-level metadata (like hashes and fingerprints)
+to help discovery and identify content from any source. File-level URLs with
+context ("repository", "author-homepage", "web-archive") should make fatcat
+more useful for both humans and machines to quickly access fulltext content of
+a given mimetype than existing redirect or landing page systems. So another
+factor in deciding scope is whether a work has "digital fixity" and can be
+contained in a single immutable file.