This is a very generic question, and I hope you all don’t mind my posting it here.
As the managers of the DOI service for Stanford Libraries (and Stanford Univ. more generally), we are periodically asked some version of this question that we recently received from a librarian at one of our coordinate libraries:
"Do you know what services index DataCite DOIs? Specifically, are DOIs minted by Stanford accessible through other indexing services aside from DataCite Search?"
I’m interested in how the folks from DataCite would answer this fairly general question. I suspect people are interested in things like Google/Google Scholar/Google Dataset Search (there is a discussion on GScholar here), but also things like Dimensions or really anywhere else that people might search for things and find content because it has a DataCite DOI.
I’ll admit that my role has never involved looking for materials for people, so I’m sometimes not entirely sure what things people might be getting at and they often seem unsure themselves. But I’ve been digging around DataCite info and I haven’t found a comprehensive response to this question, so thought I would toss it out there.
Thanks!
Hi Amy, this question has come up from our Lyrasis US consortium members as well, and this is the answer that I typically give (I believe this language was sent to me by Liz Krznarich):
In addition to DataCite search, there are a few products/services that harvest DataCite metadata directly, for use in their search or analytics features. Some of these include Clarivate’s Data Citation Index, Mendeley Data, Dimensions, Ex Libris Primo and Proquest Summon. DataCite metadata is also harvested into Scholix http://www.scholix.org/, which is a meta-service for linking publications to datasets. Scholix lists a few integrators on its site Implementors - SCHOLIX but there are many other smaller projects that use it.
All of these services work best when descriptions, subject terms, and related identifiers (ex: DOI for a publication related to a dataset or for a publication related to a preprint/postprint/author copy in a repository) are used. Here’s a blog post with some tips Making Data Discoverable Through Better Metadata – DataCite Blog
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Thanks, Sheila. This is helpful!
I’m wondering how the PID Graph fits in with these things?
It feels like a fairly complicated web of services that can be challenging, at least for me, to relate to what a researcher is interested in, which is to say “If I get a DOI for my thing, where are people going to be able to find my thing that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise?” It’s an important question to be able to answer clearly.
Hi Amy, this is a great question!
Sheila’s answer covers some of the main examples we know about. For Scholix, I would just clarify that Scholix is a framework and Scholexplorer is an aggregator of several Scholix-compatible data sources (sometimes Scholexplorer gets called “Scholix” for short, which can be confusing).
There are different implementations of what we call the “PID Graph” as a concept: a network of things/people/places represented by PIDs and the connections between them. DataCite’s PID Graph implementation is available via our GraphQL API, and DataCite Commons uses the GraphQL API. External services that harvest DataCite metadata tend to use our REST API or OAI-PMH feed; for those that are graph-based, they are incorporating DataCite metadata into their own graph implementation (which may also be a “PID Graph” if the nodes are PIDs).
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