DataCite as a novel bibliometric source: Coverage, strengths and limitations

TL;DR

This paper critically assesses DataCite as a new bibliometric source for analyzing open data, highlighting its potential despite limitations like metadata issues and lack of standardization.

Contribution

It provides an initial evaluation of DataCite's strengths and weaknesses for bibliometric analysis of open data, offering recommendations for future use.

Findings

DataCite has incomplete metadata and lacks standardization.

Despite limitations, DataCite shows potential for data metrics development.

Recommendations are provided for improving bibliometric analyses using DataCite.

Abstract

This paper explores the characteristics of DataCite to determine its possibilities and potential as a new bibliometric data source to analyze the scholarly production of open data. Open science and the increasing data sharing requirements from governments, funding bodies, institutions and scientific journals has led to a pressing demand for the development of data metrics. As a very first step towards reliable data metrics, we need to better comprehend the limitations and caveats of the information provided by sources of open data. In this paper, we critically examine records downloaded from the DataCite's OAI API and elaborate a series of recommendations regarding the use of this source for bibliometric analyses of open data. We highlight issues related to metadata incompleteness, lack of standardization, and ambiguous definitions of several fields. Despite these limitations, we emphasize DataCite's value and potential to become one of the main sources for data metrics development.