Beyond Title & Abstract - Towards an Enhanced Metadata Standard for Scientific Publishing
Maximilian Frank
(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Müchen)
Julian Quandt
(WU Vienna University of Economics and Business)
Short abstract
We argue for the importance of a new metadata standard for scientific publishing that embeds key research elements such as hypotheses, test statistics, and focal results in machine-readable format. Such a standard aims to enhance automated synthesis, meta-research, and transparency.
Long abstract
With the accelerating growth of the scientific literature, endeavours to identify its underlying quality and synthesize knowledge (e.g., systematic literature reviews, meta-analyses, and p-curve analyses) have become ever more relevant and the development of metadata databases (e.g. Scopus, CrossRef, OpenAlex) has hugely facilitated the process of identifying relevant papers for these purposes. However, access restrictions and a lack of interoperability between different databases hinder this progress and especially for non-open-access publications, only titles, abstracts, and keywords are typically available for automated analysis, severely constraining analysis to investigate large text corpora.This forces scientists to resort to laborious and inefficient text mining approaches in which they have to acquire document full-texts, convert them to machine readable formats and extract the relevant information.
We propose developing a new metadata standard for scientific publishing that embeds key research elements—formalized hypothesis, test statistics, and results— into a structured, machine-readable format. By extending metadata beyond abstracts, this standard would enhance automated research synthesis, enable large-scale metascientific investigations, and improve transparency and reproducibility.
The Metascience 2025, with its unique intersection between researchers and other stakeholders of scientific process, seems to us to be an ideal opportunity to advance this topic. We will explore challenges in implementation, potential incentives for adoption, and pathways for integration within existing infrastructures. By discussing with, and fostering collaboration across disciplines and among institutions, publishers, librarians, and research infrastructure providers we seek to establish a roadmap for a metadata standard that can transform metascientific research at scale.
Accepted Paper
Short abstract
Long abstract
With the accelerating growth of the scientific literature, endeavours to identify its underlying quality and synthesize knowledge (e.g., systematic literature reviews, meta-analyses, and p-curve analyses) have become ever more relevant and the development of metadata databases (e.g. Scopus, CrossRef, OpenAlex) has hugely facilitated the process of identifying relevant papers for these purposes. However, access restrictions and a lack of interoperability between different databases hinder this progress and especially for non-open-access publications, only titles, abstracts, and keywords are typically available for automated analysis, severely constraining analysis to investigate large text corpora.This forces scientists to resort to laborious and inefficient text mining approaches in which they have to acquire document full-texts, convert them to machine readable formats and extract the relevant information.
We propose developing a new metadata standard for scientific publishing that embeds key research elements—formalized hypothesis, test statistics, and results— into a structured, machine-readable format. By extending metadata beyond abstracts, this standard would enhance automated research synthesis, enable large-scale metascientific investigations, and improve transparency and reproducibility.
The Metascience 2025, with its unique intersection between researchers and other stakeholders of scientific process, seems to us to be an ideal opportunity to advance this topic. We will explore challenges in implementation, potential incentives for adoption, and pathways for integration within existing infrastructures. By discussing with, and fostering collaboration across disciplines and among institutions, publishers, librarians, and research infrastructure providers we seek to establish a roadmap for a metadata standard that can transform metascientific research at scale.
Synthezisers: metascience for meta-analysis
Session 1 Tuesday 1 July, 2025, -