Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata

January 2020

Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata

Published in Quantitative Science Studies (2020), this paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made openly available by Crossref — its history, scale, content types, and role in the research ecosystem.

Strategists

Understand why Crossref metadata is foundational scholarly infrastructure. The history, governance, and community model that make Crossref a sustainable, neutral, member-owned source of scholarly data.

Decision-makers

Know what’s in the metadata and what it enables. 106 million records, 13 content types — not just bibliographic basics but funding, licences, citation links, corrections, and retractions.

Practitioners

Learn how to access Crossref metadata at scale. A technical overview of the REST API and OAI-PMH, with context on citation data provision and metadata quality trends.

What this paper covers

  • History and governance — how Crossref was founded in 2000 and why its member-owned, not-for-profit structure matters for long-term sustainability
  • Scale of the metadata set (in 2021) — over 106 million records across journals, conference papers, books, datasets, preprints, peer reviews, grants, and more
  • Richness beyond basic bibliographic data — abstracts, full-text links, funding and licence information, citation links, corrections, updates, and retractions
  • Role in the research ecosystem — how Crossref metadata directly supports scientometrics, research assessment, and scholarly communications research
  • APIs and access — the REST API and OAI-PMH as the primary routes to Crossref metadata at scale
  • Citation data — the evolution of Crossref’s citation data provision, including the move to open references
  • Metadata quality and curation — trends in completeness and accuracy over time, and plans for improvement

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Published
1 January 2020

Cite as

Hendricks, G., Tkaczyk, D., Lin, J., & Feeney, P. (2020). Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), 414–427. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00022

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Page maintainer: Dominika Tkacyzk
Last updated: 2020-January-01