Hello, I’m Paul, a technical support specialist here at Crossref.
We have a lot of tickets coming into support from authors who have noticed that their name has been misspelt in the metadata that has been sent to us. In the authors’ messages to us, they request that this be updated.
A misspelt name can cause more issues than the obvious missed recognition to the author. It can mean that systems which rely on metadata from Crossref might not be able to match and thus confirm added works to an account for the author. We have seen this many times when authors are using the Lattes Platform in Brazil, which relies on adding works to an author’s CV using the metadata obtained from Crossref’s APIs. This match doesn’t work if the author’s name in Lattes mismatches the metadata registered with Crossref. It can also mean that works are not returned when searching against that name in many tools, including the search tool we offer here.
In the example that I dealt with recently, it was only a small error but as mentioned above it can be quite impactful.
It started with an email from an author.
Dear staff from Crossref,
I would like to please request a correction of the mistake in my name in the metadata for the following entry:
“A Prospective Report of the Clinical Outcome of TiUnite Implants at 20 Years of Follow-Up
JOURNAL ARTICLE published April 2024 in International Journal of Oral & Maxillofacial Implants
Authors: PO Östman | BD Chrcanovic | T Albrektsson
A Prospective Report of the Clinical Outcome of TiUnite Implants at 20 Years of Follow-Up | Quintessence Publishing Company, Inc.”It should be “BR Chrcanovic” instead of “BD Chrcanovic”.
I have also requested the journal to correct the mistake.
Thank you.
I checked the metadata against that DOI to make sure it was inaccurate in the Crossref metadata, rather than somewhere else (as that can sometimes be the issue).
(You can view all of the metadata against a DOI by adding the DOI to the end of this link and clicking on it or pasting it into your browser address bar:
You might need an xml viewer extension on your browser to view the xml in a more user friendly way. Some browsers already have XML readers included, but there are many options available for your favourite browser. I have used this one in the past: XML Tree
After finding the incorrect metadata against the DOI, I then needed to find out who was the steward against the DOI. This can be found using the above link to the XML API.
Here you can see the Crossref member in charge of the metadata against the DOI is “Quintessence Publishing” with the prefix 10.11607.
I contacted Quintessence Publishing. They were super responsive, but had not worked with updating the metadata against a DOI before.
Dear Specialist Davis,
An author made you and Quintessence aware that there is an error in the metadata for their article (link; “BD Chrcanovic” should be changed to “BR Chrcanovic”). Your replies to Dr Chrcanovic indicate that a new metadata deposit must be submitted in order to correct this. However, I do not know how to upload new Metadata.
Therefore, I’m hoping you can help me with 3 different things:
- How do I upload new metadata for the article in question (doi: 10.11607/jomi.10654) so that the author’s name can be corrected? I have never done this and do not know the steps.
- Can you please help me log in to the Quintessence Publishing account so that I can access all services?
- Once logged in to the Quintessence Publishing account, can users be added/removed? I would like to update the information so that current employees are listed and former employees are removed.
Thank you very much for all of your help with these matters—It is truly appreciated! If anything I said is unclear, or if there is a different person/department I should contact for these problems, please let me know.
Thank you
For any members out there reading this then you are able to update metadata against your DOI at any point by redepositing the metadata to us with the correct metadata included. Be sure to include all available metadata when redepositing, as the metadata recorded in our system will be overwritten by the new deposit.
If you are editing an XML file that has already been deposited, be sure to increment the value in the field. The number in the timestamp field needs to increase each time a DOI is updated.
If you are using one of our registration tools then the timestamp is incremented by the tool itself.
We were able to retrieve the XML that was originally sent to us with the spelling mistake and once we had that we were able to open the XML file in an XML editor, make the changes needed and then the publisher member redeposited the file to us with the increased timestamp and this updated the metadata within the system and then eventually in tools that use Crossref metadata, like Lattes.