Exploring Coverage and Distribution of Identifiers on the Scholarly Web

TL;DR

This study analyzes the distribution and coverage of scholarly identifiers like DOI and arXiv ID across platforms such as arXiv, Mendeley, and CrossRef, revealing DOI's superior findability and coverage stability over time.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into identifier coverage and distribution, highlighting the relative effectiveness of DOIs versus arXiv IDs in scholarly web environments.

Findings

DOIs are more effective for findability than arXiv IDs.

Coverage of articles on Mendeley decreases over recent years.

DOI coverage remains stable compared to decreasing Mendeley coverage.

Abstract

In a scientific publishing environment that is increasingly moving online, identifiers of scholarly work are gaining in importance. In this paper, we analysed identifier distribution and coverage of articles from the discipline of quantitative biology using arXiv, Mendeley and CrossRef as data sources. The results show that when retrieving arXiv articles from Mendeley, we were able to find more papers using the DOI than the arXiv ID. This indicates that DOI may be a better identifier with respect to findability. We also find that coverage of articles on Mendeley decreases in the most recent years, whereas the coverage of DOIs does not decrease in the same order of magnitude. This hints at the fact that there is a certain time lag involved, before articles are covered in crowd-sourced services on the scholarly web.