Questions about DOI Replacement and Citation Records: A Case between Preprints and Published Articles

[pedrohenriquenacross]

Dear community members,

I hope this message finds you well.

I have some questions regarding the registration of a reference I found and would like to clarify them with you:

https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works/http:/dx.doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering8070098/transform/application/vnd.crossref.unixsd+xml

The article “10.3390/bioengineering8070098” cited the work “Hasan, M.R., Mirza, F., Al-Hail, H., Sundararaju, S., Xaba, T., Iqbal, M., Alhussain, H., Yassine, H.M., Perez-Lopez, A., and Tang, P. (2020). Detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA by Direct RT-QPCR on Nasopharyngeal Specimens without Extraction of Viral RNA. PLoS ONE, 15”. See: citation key=“ref_99”

Notice that the journal name “PLoS ONE” appears in the citation.

It is important to highlight that the Crossref record of the citing article “10.3390/bioengineering8070098” was created on 2021-07-13, while the cited article was published in 2020. However, in Crossref metadata, the cited work, “Hasan et al 2020”, provides the DOI “10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755”, which is associated with a preprint on medRxiv and not with a PLoS ONE journal article. Another point to consider is that the last update of the metadata for “10.3390/bioengineering8070098” occurred on 2024-07-15.

My assumption is that the citing article initially referenced the preprint and, later, with the preprint being published in a journal, someone altered the metadata to make it appear that the citing article referred to the published version instead of the preprint.

My questions are as follows:

A) In this specific case, does Crossref count the citation to “Hasan et al 2020” towards the preprint on medRxiv, or towards the article on PLoS ONE? Or towards both?

B) In general, is it possible to replace the DOI of a after the work has been published? Specifically, in this case, would it be possible to replace the DOI “10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755” from with the DOI of the published article in PLoS ONE (“10.1371/journal.pone.0236564”) at any time?

C) If the answer to question B is affirmative, what happens to the citations accumulated for the DOI “10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755”? Would they be lost or deleted?

D) If the answer to question B is negative, is it possible to replace the DOI of a before the work is published? In other words, in this specific case, would it have been possible to replace the DOI “10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755” from with the DOI of the published article in PLoS ONE (“10.1371/journal.pone.0236564”) (assuming both were already published, of course) before the citing article “10.3390/bioengineering8070098” was made publicly available?

E) I have seen this happen in many cases. What is Crossref’s recommendation regarding situations like these?

Thank you in advance for your attention and any clarification.

Sincerely,
Pedro

Prints:

[ifarley]

Hello @pedrohenriquenacross ,

Thanks for this post. Excellent questions! See my answers below.

A) In this specific case, does Crossref count the citation to “Hasan et al 2020” towards the preprint on medRxiv, or towards the article on PLoS ONE? Or towards both?

Crossref counts the citation to “Hasan et al 2020” to DOI 10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755, as you can see here and below from our XML API.

We can’t count count individual citations to more than one DOI, so we would never establish cited-by connections to both a preprint and a version of record with one single reference. Instead, the metadata should include the DOI that was cited by the authors. If that was the preprint, then the metadata should reference DOI 10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755. If that is the version of record, then DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0236564 should be referenced in the metadata.

B) In general, is it possible to replace the DOI of a after the work has been published? Specifically, in this case, would it be possible to replace the DOI “10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755” from with the DOI of the published article in PLoS ONE (“10.1371/journal.pone.0236564”) at any time?

Yes, we allow metadata registered with us to be updated, so this reference (or, any of the other metadata registered for this DOI) could be updated. Those updates would have to come from the member responsible for the metadata registered for DOI 10.3390/bioengineering8070098, MDPI AG.

C) If the answer to question B is affirmative, what happens to the citations accumulated for the DOI “10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755”? Would they be lost or deleted?

This isn’t the most relevant question to ask, in my opinion, albeit I will answer it below. First though, as above, if the authors were citing the preprint, then the preprint DOI should be in the reference metadata registered with Crossref. The preprint and the version of record are separate works with separate DOIs. Best practice for those two DOIs - the preprint and the version of record - is for them to be linked with a isVersionOf and hasVersion reciprocal metadata relationship so that could all be seen in the metadata records of the DOIs, but the cited-by count will and should only go to one single DOI.

If the metadata for DOI 10.3390/bioengineering8070098 was/is legitimately updated to shift the DOI cited in ref_99 from 10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755 to 10.1371/journal.pone.0236564, then we’d reduce the cited-by count to 10.1101/2020.04.18.20070755 by one and increase the cited-by count to 10.1371/journal.pone.0236564 by one.

E) I have seen this happen in many cases. What is Crossref’s recommendation regarding situations like these?

I believe I have provided our recommendations here, but do let me know if anything is unclear or if you wish to discuss this further.

Warm regards,
Isaac