Identifying and correcting invalid citations due to DOI errors in Crossref data

Alessia Cioffi (), Sara Coppini (), Arcangelo Massari (), Arianna Moretti (), Silvio Peroni (), Cristian Santini () and Nooshin Shahidzadeh Asadi ()
Additional contact information
Alessia Cioffi: University of Bologna
Sara Coppini: University of Bologna
Arcangelo Massari: University of Bologna
Arianna Moretti: University of Bologna
Silvio Peroni: University of Bologna
Cristian Santini: FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure
Nooshin Shahidzadeh Asadi: University of Antwerp

Scientometrics, 2022, vol. 127, issue 6, No 31, 3593-3612

Abstract: Abstract This work aims to identify classes of DOI mistakes by analysing the open bibliographic metadata available in Crossref, highlighting which publishers were responsible for such mistakes and how many of these incorrect DOIs could be corrected through automatic processes. By using a list of invalid cited DOIs gathered by OpenCitations while processing the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations (COCI) in the past two years, we retrieved the citations in the January 2021 Crossref dump to such invalid DOIs. We processed these citations by keeping track of their validity and the publishers responsible for uploading the related citation data in Crossref. Finally, we identified patterns of factual errors in the invalid DOIs and the regular expressions needed to catch and correct them. The outcomes of this research show that only a few publishers were responsible for and/or affected by the majority of invalid citations. We extended the taxonomy of DOI name errors proposed in past studies and defined more elaborated regular expressions that can clean a higher number of mistakes in invalid DOIs than prior approaches. The data gathered in our study can enable investigating possible reasons for DOI mistakes from a qualitative point of view, helping publishers identify the problems underlying their production of invalid citation data. Also, the DOI cleaning mechanism we present could be integrated into the existing process (e.g. in COCI) to add citations by automatically correcting a wrong DOI. This study was run strictly following Open Science principles, and, as such, our research outcomes are fully reproducible.

Keywords: Invalid citations; Incorrect DOI; Open citations; Crossref; OpenCitations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-022-04367-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:127:y:2022:i:6:d:10.1007_s11192-022-04367-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04367-w

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().