Assessing the uptake of persistent identifiers by research infrastructure users

Abstract

Significant progress has been made in the past few years in the development of recommendations, policies, and procedures for creating and promoting citations to data sets, software, and other research infrastructures like computing facilities. Open questions remain, however, about the extent to which referencing practices of authors of scholarly publications are changing in ways desired by these initiatives. This paper uses four focused case studies to evaluate whether research infrastructures are being increasingly identified and referenced in the research literature via persistent citable identifiers. The findings of the case studies show that references to such resources are increasing, but that the patterns of these increases are variable. In addition, the study suggests that citation practices for data sets may change more slowly than citation practices for software and research facilities, due to the inertia of existing practices for referencing the use of data. Similarly, existing practices for acknowledging computing support may slow the adoption of formal citations for computing resources.

Publication History: A Double-DOI-Based Method for Storing and/or Monitoring Information about Published and Corrected Academic Literature

“…The most evident envisioned advantages of DDPH are: 1. practical use by all participants and stakeholders of the academic publishing process either for confirmation, verification, or evaluation: authors, peer reviewers, publishers, librarians, funders, service and infrastructure providers; 2. fortification of a document's history, centralization of information, and thus transparency through the use of a popular, persistent, unique and actionable tool, the DOI; 3. potential stimulation of the expanded use of DOI to the Chinese literature where the DOI has been weakly adopted (Wang et al, 2018); 4. the downstream fortification of the validity and reliability of a citation or reference (Mayernik and Maull, 2017); 5. as a result of the above advantages, the ability to independently trace if the VoR was manipulated, or not, which may be useful for ethics investigations where a fine-scale appreciation of the historical evolution of a paper might be needed; 6. an open/public tool that allows authors to hold editors and publishers accountable for any manipulative or predatory practices, and vice versa; 7. despite the existence of a wealth of data identification systems, some more elaborate than others (Lee and Stvilia, 2014), to the authors' knowledge, none has yet been able to effectively detect and record changes in VoR, if at all, nor is there a single approach today to support all uses of dynamic data citation formal information associated with a publishing entity, e.g., journal or publisher). 9. an analysis of the information about the most common reasons for making changes to documents is likely to help improve the editorial process and allow editors to avoid common mistakes.…”

The hurdles of current data citation practices and the adding-value of providing PIDs below study level

“…Another example refers to the PIDs assigned for each specific element within the paper. Even though the paper has a study-level PID [34], it provides specific PIDs to the figure [35], charts [36], and table [37]. These examples show how quickly it is to find a specific fragment of data when having a PID according to the granularity level.…”

Scholarly resource linking: Building out a “relationship life cycle”

“…The first effort within the project was to conduct a case study‐based assessment to evaluate whether research infrastructures are being increasingly identified and referenced in the research literature via persistent citable identifiers. In this study (Mayernik & Maull, ), citations and references for four resources ‐ two data sets, a software package, and a supercomputing facility ‐ were collected manually using Google Scholar searches and analyzed to assess the ways that the resources had been referenced by researchers who used them, by characterizing how often the resources were referenced in papers through in‐text descriptions, mentioned via acknowledgements, or explicitly cited in reference lists. Findings from this study showed how persistent identifiers assigned to the four examined resources were indeed being used in references in published papers on an increasing basis.…”