Metadata for Research Data: Current Practices and Trends

This paper reports a study that examined the metadata standards and formats used by a select number of research data services, namely Datacite, Dataverse Network, Dryad, and FigShare. These services make use of a broad range of metadata practices and elements. The specific objective of the study was to investigate the number and nature of metadata elements, metadata elements specific to research data, compliance with interoperability and preservation standards, the use of controlled vocabularies for subject description and access and the extent of support for unique identifiers as well as the common and different metadata elements across these services. The study found that there was a variety of metadata elements used by the research data services and that the use of controlled vocabularies was common across the services. It was found that preservation and unique identifiers are central components of the studied services. An interesting observation was the extent of research data specific metadata elements, with Dryad making use of a wider range of metadata elements specific to research data than other services