Two relatedIdentifier entries for same work

When including related works in the DOI metadata, is it considered good or bad practice to include a work more than once in the relatedIdentifier section if it has more than one identifier? I have someone I am creating a DOI for who is suggesting to me that if an article has a PMID and a DOI that there should be two relatedIdentifier entries in order to capture both identifiers.

My thought is that it should only be included once with the DOI, and that the PMID information belongs in the DOI metadata for the related article as an alternate identifer. But I have no control over that other DOI from the journal (which I assume is a CrossRef DOI and has an alternateIdentifier option? I’m not very familiar with their md schema), so if the PMID is not included there, there’s nothing I can do about it. Or is it better practice or acceptable to include the related work twice to capture both identifiers?

Thanks!

Ooh, this is a tricky one! My instinct is the same as yours but, as you say, that’s not possible if you don’t control the DOI metadata for the related article.

Longer term, I’d say that the planned feature Additional Sources for PID Graph will help out in cases like these, and for now I would stick to only including one RelatedIdentifier per work. Hopefully, in the future, PubMed itself would be a trusted source of assertions about PID relationships relating to PMIDs.

1 Like