This paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem. Containing over 106 million records and expanding at an average rate of 11% a year, Crossref’s metadata has become one of the major sources of scholarly data for publishers, authors, librarians, funders, and researchers. The metadata set consists of 13 content types, including not only traditional types, such as journals and conference papers, but also data sets, reports, preprints, peer reviews, and grants. The metadata is not limited to basic publication metadata, but can also include abstracts and links to full text, funding and license information, citation links, and the information about corrections, updates, retractions, etc. This scale and breadth make Crossref a valuable source for research in scientometrics, including measuring the growth and impact of science and understanding new trends in scholarly communications. The metadata is available through a number of APIs, including REST API and OAI-PMH. In this paper, we describe the kind of metadata that Crossref provides and how it is collected and curated. We also look at Crossref’s role in the research ecosystem and trends in metadata curation over the years, including the evolution of its citation data provision. We summarize the research used in Crossref’s metadata and describe plans that will improve metadata quality and retrieval in the future.
Manuscript submission systems and metadata completeness in Crossref: Patterns and associations
The importance of open research information, particularly publication metadata, is widely recognised. Crossref is one of the most important infrastructures for registering open metadata as part of DOI record registration. It is widely known, however, that the metadata of many publications is far from complete, with many publishers making certain metadata openly available, but failing to do so for other metadata elements. Publishers’ ability to register this metadata with Crossref depends on their capacity to capture and retain this data in their production workflows. Manuscript submission systems are an important, yet largely overlooked, factor in the extent to which publishers make metadata available through Crossref. In this paper, we present the results of an analysis investigating the relation between the level of metadata that publishers deposit with Crossref and the submission systems that they deploy for their journals. We have looked at the 153 publishers with the largest amounts of publications in Crossref and concentrate on the four most commonly used systems: Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, Open Journal Systems (OJS) and eJournalPress. We show that some submission systems appear better suited to capturing certain metadata elements. However, there are always cases where publishers using the same system differ widely in the level of metadata they register, suggesting that technology is not the only prohibiting factor and other considerations are at play.
SemRepo: A Knowledge Graph for Research Software and Its Scholarly Ecosystem
We present SemRepo, an RDF knowledge graph comprising over 81 million triples describing nearly 200,000 GitHub repositories associated with scientific research. SemRepo captures repository-level metadata, such as contributors, issues, and programming languages, and interlinks this information with external scholarly knowledge graphs. In particular, repository authors are linked to their profiles in SemOpenAlex, repositories are connected to scholarly publications in LPWC, and research artifacts, such as datasets and experiments, are linked via MLSea-KG. This integration enables queries that span publications and their scholarly artifacts, which are typically fragmented across separate platforms. SemRepo supports analyses that are difficult to perform with existing resources in isolation, including provenance reconstruction across repositories and publications, as well as the systematic identification of risks to research reproducibility and software sustainability. By unifying research software with its scholarly context in a single graph, SemRepo provides an important infrastructure for large-scale analysis of software within the broader scientific research ecosystem.
You are Crossref - Crossref
Crossref runs open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions—creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with our >25,000 members in 167 countries, we drive metadata exchange and support 2.1 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.
Two billion citation links in Crossref help research travel further - Crossref
We’ve recently reached an important milestone for the research nexus: the works in our metadata corpus are now connected with over 2 billion citation links! This is a great opportunity to share a dedicated dataset and discuss why these are important for science.
SemRepo.org
SemRepo is a large-scale RDF knowledge graph of GitHub repositories linked to scientific research. SemRepo captures fine-grained repository-level metadata (e.g., contributors, issues, programming languages) and interlinks this with external scholarly knowledge graphs: repositories to publications in LPWC, repository authors to their profiles in SemOpenAlex, and research artifacts (e.g., datasets, experiments) are linked via MLSea.
The Research Nexus vision for a more connected scholarly community
Crossref envisions “a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society”. This Research Nexus expands on the importance of research objects being persistently and uniquely identified. The scholarly community has an established practice of connecting things such as citations to others’ work and it is increasingly critical to identify relationships beyond citations, bringing together published work, unpublished work, institutions, individuals, and identifying the actions that they take e.g., funding, publishing, creating, modifying, citing, and sharing. The Research Nexus brings together metadata and relationships to build a joined-up picture of the scholarly ecosystem and helps everyone identify these relationships and how they change through time. This vision is possible if all parts of the scholarly ecosystem (and beyond) work together, including various scholarly infrastructure organizations.
Evaluating Multilingual Metadata Quality in Crossref
Introduction: Scholarly research spans multiple languages, making multilingual metadata crucial for organizing and accessing knowledge across linguistic boundaries. These multilingual metadata already exist and are propagated throughout scholarly publishing infrastructure, but the extent to which they are correctly recorded, or how they affect metadata quality more broadly is little understood. Methods: Our study quantifies the prevalence of multilingual records across a sample of publisher metadata and offers an understanding of their completeness, quality, and alignment with metadata standards. Utilizing the Crossref API to generate a random sample of 519,665 journal article records, we categorize each record into four distinct language types: English monolingual, non-English monolingual, multilingual, and uncategorized. We then investigate the prevalence of programmatically-detectable errors and the prevalence of multilingual records within the sample to determine whether multilingualism influences the quality of article metadata. Results: We find that English-only records are still in the vast majority among metadata found in Crossref, but that, while non-English and multilingual records present unique challenges, they are not a source of significant metadata quality issues and, in few instances, are more complete or correct than English monolingual records. Discussion & Conclusion: Our findings contribute to discussions surrounding multilingualism in scholarly communication, serving as a resource for researchers, publishers, and information professionals seeking to enhance the global dissemination of knowledge and foster inclusivity in the academic landscape.
Crossmark - Crossref
The Crossmark button gives readers quick and easy access to the current status of an item of content, including any corrections, retractions, or updates to that record. Crossmark provides a cross-platform way for readers to quickly discover the status of a research output along with additional metadata related to the editorial process. Crucially, the Crossmark button can also be embedded in PDFs, which means that members have a way of alerting readers to changes months or even years after it’s been downloaded.
Crossmark - Crossref
The Crossmark button gives readers quick and easy access to the current status of an item of content, including any corrections, retractions, or updates to that record. Crossmark provides a cross-platform way for readers to quickly discover the status of a research output along with additional metadata related to the editorial process. Crucially, the Crossmark button can also be embedded in PDFs, which means that members have a way of alerting readers to changes months or even years after it’s been downloaded.
Research Guides: List of APIs for Scholarly Resources: Scholarly Metadata API
A list of commonly used scholarly resources API
Research Guides: List of APIs for Scholarly Resources: Other Data APIs
A list of commonly used scholarly resources API
Steps Towards an Infrastructure for Scholarly Synthesis
Sharing, reusing, and synthesizing knowledge is central to the research process, both individually, and with others. These core functions are not supported by our formal scholarly publishing infrastructure: instead of the smooth functioning of functional infrastructure, researchers resort to laborious "hacks" and workarounds to "mine" publications for what they need, and struggle to efficiently share the resulting information with others. Information scientists have proposed an alternative infrastructure based on the more appropriately granular model of a discourse graph of claims, and evidence, along with key rhetorical relationships between them. However, despite significant technical progress on standards and platforms, the predominant infrastructure remains steadfastly document-based. Drawing from infrastructure studies, we locate the current infrastructural bottlenecks in the lack of local systems that integrate discourse-centric models to augment synthesis work, from which an infrastructure for synthesis can be grown. Through 3 years of research through design and field deployment in a distributed community of hypertext notebook users, we elaborate a design vision of what can and should be built in order to grow a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure: a thriving "installed base" of researchers authoring local, shareable discourse graphs to improve synthesis work, enhance primary research and research training, and augment collaborative research. We discuss how this design vision -- and our empirical work -- contributes steps towards a new infrastructure for synthesis, and increases HCI's capacity to advance collective intelligence and solve infrastructure-level problems.
Scimeto - Automated Manuscript Integrity Checker
Upload your academic manuscript and get instant analysis of citations, references, statistics, retractions, and more. 21 plugins, 9 citation styles, free for researchers.
Great survey of the "scholarly interface design" frontier that also highlights the emerging role of the atproto.science and modular research ecosystems - @chive.pub @paperstarsorg.bsky.social @cosmik.network @semble.so @margin.at @discoursegraphs.bsky.social @curvenote.com and many more!
leotrs
1/ Scholarly publishing spent thirty years arguing about access. It has barely started arguing about what readers do with the paper once they have it. That second argument is turning into a field, forming around how science gets read and judged. Here is the map as I see it: aris.pub/blog/scholarly-interface-desi…
Scholarly APIs ⚗️
Commonly used scholarly resources API
Scholary infrastructure and the research nexus
The research nexus is "a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society." (crossref.org/documentation/research-nexus/)
Elsevier Developer Portal
Elsevier Developer Portal
Elsevier Developer Portal
About the Indicators API Documentation – World Bank Data Help Desk
API
developer.nytimes.com
SemRepo.org
Science discussions of retracted articles on Bluesky: public scrutiny or misinformation spreading?
Tesseract Academy for the Public Sector - Research, AI & Public Sector Delivery Partner
Position paper: persistent identifiers in research infrastructure policy - Crossref
Resilient Data Futures — Discourse Graph
In an era where research evaluation methods are evolving, the Research Contribution Claim Network makes trustworthy tracking of non-traditional research output easy!
