Crossref Metadata Evolution - 2019 - 2025
/Ted Habermann, Metadata Game Changers
The recent description of work at Crossref creating a dataset of grant<>output relationships included a sentence that really struck me: “The percentage of relationships that are registered explicitly by Crossref members providing grants IDs in funding information has grown from less than 0.1% in 2023 to 1% (modest numbers but amazing growth!)”. We are still in the early days of this work and recognizing growth across the community is important.
This brought to mind some work I did using Crossref Participation Reports to quantify Crossref metadata improvement (Habermann, 2019 a,b). I collected these data during 2019 and can compare them to recent numbers to shed light on Crossref metadata evolution over the last six years.
This Figure compares the average participation report values for all journal-articles in Crossref during two time periods: 2017-early 2019 and 2023-present (the “current” periods at the time the data were collected). The data show impressive growth in several areas. The completeness of abstracts increased from 27 to 75% while licenses and ORCID iDs both increased over 20% with resource links not far behind (in the data but not displayed in the participation reports). The similarity check service provided by Crossref also increased significantly. It is important to keep in mind that the number of journals included in Crossref has nearly doubled between these two times (see numbers in parentheses in Figure 1) so the increases in real numbers are even more impressive.
The data confirm the small amount of funder metadata mentioned above, and also show important opportunities for increasing the number of affiliations and RORs for identifying organizations in the metadata. Both of these are increasing recently, along with ORCID ids and funder ids, as all these identifiers are integrated into submission systems.
Of course, we are in the early days, and can look forward to more improvements coming up as the entire landscape matures! Many thanks to Crosseref for building this foundation that we all rely on. Looking forward to another wonderful 25 years!
References
Habermann, T. (2019a). Metadata Evolution - CrossRef Participation Reports. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.59350/b0ctp-heh14.
Habermann, T. (2019b). The Big Picture - Has CrossRef metadata completeness improved?. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.59350/4svpe-kcj07