This is the third in a series of blog posts in which CCC shares our analysis, undertaken with Media Growth Strategies, of metadata management across each stage of the research lifecycle with the scholarly community to spark dialogue and drive action. Our first blog in this series looked at the metadata challenges that researchers and other stakeholders face during the idea development and proposal preparation stages. Our second blog examined the interactions between researchers and funders during the proposal submission stage. In this blog, we focus on the research & authoring stage.
Valid Research is Difficult for Global Researchers to Discover
The researcher (or group of research collaborators) faces several metadata-related barriers in the very beginning steps of the investigation process. For example, during the full literature review, researchers may find it difficult to find valid and comprehensive research to answer their questions or formulate their hypothesis. Relevant research coming from under-represented regions can be hard to find due to the lack of metadata connected to that research, including digital object identifiers (DOIs). Discovery can also be difficult because of the inconsistencies in identifying legitimate users and enabling them to access research. Our study found that some researchers may not have equitable access to search and discovery services—and subsequently lose out on publication opportunities. Whether because of the lack of access or the inability to find relevant research, incomplete metadata can result in inequities that hinder scientific progress.
Additionally, when attending conferences for scientific debates or conducting research on the data produced by conferences, researchers may be able to find PIDs that include output from the conferences. However, no unique conference persistent identifier exists, which makes it hard for funders and institutions to track the progress of research projects.
Researchers also need to organize references and share early outputs as they work toward publication. Our research found that due to the challenge of needing to work with different citation tools using different PIDs, URLs are often saved in place of DOIs. Poor connections across research outputs can occur when free-text fields prevail over standardized picklists powered by PIDs and when there’s inconsistent application of PIDs across research outputs—such as data sets, equipment, settings, and software. The inability to easily find, verify and reuse relevant data and research artifacts makes it difficult to accurately interpret, cite, and reproduce research findings.
Selecting a Publication for Article Submission
Unfortunately, some submission processes are less OA-aware than others. When researchers or administrators have to manually indicate the corresponding author, co-authors, appropriate institutional affiliation, and funder relationships, or when they are unaware of the OA implications when validating values that are pre-populated using AI methods, inaccurate or incomplete data may appear downstream. This can hinder the identification of OA funding eligibility and compliance terms, creating costly retrospective work across researchers, institutions, publishers, funders, and service providers.
Guide to Metadata Management Across the Research Lifecycle
While researching metadata management during each stage of the research lifecycle, a key artifact CCC developed by leveraging the data and the insights we gained from this study is an interactive report. This report guides you through metadata management—highlighting the challenges, related impacts, and key decision points. The report also offers the opportunity to provide your input and feedback.
In our next blog post, we discuss the metadata challenges faced by researchers, institutions, funders and publishers during the publication & preservation stage. To learn more today, please visit The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 where we also invite you to provide your input through the feedback function.