Scholarly metadata as trust signals: opportunities for journal editors

November 2024

Scholarly metadata as trust signals: opportunities for journal editors

Published in Science Editor (Vol. 47, No. 4, December 2024), this article reframes scholarly metadata as a practical trust signal in the fight to protect research integrity β€” and sets out specific, actionable opportunities for journal editors to use Crossref metadata to detect, deter, and respond to integrity threats.

Strategists

Understand why metadata is integrity infrastructure. The presence and richness of metadata β€” not the DOI itself β€” is what carries trust signals across the scholarly record.

Decision-makers

Know which metadata to require and check. A practical framework for journal editors making policy decisions on contributor identifiers, affiliations, funding, peer review, and update notices.

Practitioners

See where to act in editorial workflows. Concrete opportunities to use Crossref metadata, Crossmark, and Cited-by to detect paper mills, citation cartels, and other integrity threats.

What this article covers

  • The integrity landscape β€” paper mills, citation cartels, fabricated peer reviews, fake papers, and AI-generated images as emerging threats to the scholarly record
  • Metadata as trust signal β€” why the DOI alone does not signal quality, and how the presence (or absence) of associated metadata acts as evidence of trustworthiness
  • Crossref’s role β€” how open, machine-readable metadata across member deposits enables downstream services and editors to assess research outputs at scale
  • ROR IDs β€” how organisation identifiers help connect problematic manuscripts to their institutional context
  • Crossmark β€” how update notices, retractions, and corrections strengthen the integrity of the scholarly record after publication
  • Cited-by β€” how citation context can surface citation patterns worth attention
  • A call to journal editors β€” concrete opportunities to enrich the metadata you deposit and to draw on the metadata others have deposited

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Published
4 November 2024

Cite as

Amdekar, M. S. (2024). Scholarly metadata as trust signals: opportunities for journal editors. Science Editor, 47(4). https://doi.org/10.36591/SE-4704-10

Page maintainer: Madhura Amdekar
Last updated: 2024-November-04