We believe in Persistent Identifiers. We believe in defence in depth. Today we’re excited to announce an upgrade to our data resilience strategy.
Defence in depth means layers of security and resilience, and that means layers of backups. For some years now, our last line of defence has been a reliable, tried-and-tested technology. One that’s been around for a while. Yes, I’m talking about the humble 5ÂĽ inch floppy disk.
Recording data citations supports data reuse and aids research integrity and reproducibility. Crossref makes it easy for our members to submit data citations to support the scholarly record.
TL;DR Citations are essential/core metadata that all members should submit for all articles, conference proceedings, preprints, and books. Submitting data citations to Crossref has long been possible. And it’s easy, you just need to:
Include data citations in the references section as you would for any other citation Include a DOI or other persistent identifier for the data if it is available - just as you would for any other citation Submit the references to Crossref through the content registration process as you would for any other record And your data citations will flow through all the normal processes that Crossref applies to citations.
At Crossref, we care a lot about the completeness and quality of metadata. Gathering robust metadata from across the global network of scholarly communication is essential for effective co-creation of the research nexus and making the inner workings of academia traceable and transparent. We invest time in community initiatives such as Metadata 20/20 and Better Together webinars. We encourage members to take time to look up their participation reports, and our team can support you if you’re looking to understand and improve any aspects of metadata coverage of your content.
What’s in the metadata matters because it is So.Heavily.Used.
You might be tired of hearing me say it but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our open APIs now see over 1 billion queries per month. The metadata is ingested, displayed and redistributed by a vast, global array of systems and services that in whole or in part are often designed to point users to relevant content. It’s also heavily used by researchers, who author the content that is described in the metadata they analyze.
Contact us to ask for the Cited-by service to be enabled for your prefix(es).
We match the metadata in the references to DOIs to establish Cited-by links in the database. As new content is registered, we automatically update the citations and, for those members with Cited-by alerts enabled, we notify you of the new links.
Display the links on your website. We recommend displaying citations you retrieve on DOI landing pages, for example:
If you are a member through a Sponsor, you may have access to Cited-by through your sponsor – please contact them for more details.
Citation matching
Members sometimes submit references without including a DOI tag for the cited work. When this happens, we look for a match based on the metadata provided. If we find one, the reference metadata is updated with the DOI and we add the "doi-asserted-by": "crossref" tag. If we don’t find a match immediately, we will try again at a later date.
There are some references for which we won’t find matches, for example where a DOI has been registered with an agency other than Crossref (such as DataCite) or if the reference refers to an object without a DOI, including conferences, manuals, blog posts, and some journals’ articles.
To perform matching, we first check if a DOI tag is included in the reference metadata. If so, we assume it is correct and link the corresponding work. If there isn’t a DOI tag, we perform a search using the metadata supplied and select candidate results by thresholding. The best match is found through a further validation process. Learn more about how we match references. The same process is used for the results shown on our Simple Text Query tool.
All citation to a work are returned in the corresponding Cited-by query.
Page owner: Isaac Farley | Last updated 2022-May-31