Crossref Guide
These tools answer three questions about a journal's or publisher's Crossref metadata: what's in it, what it connects to, and how it has changed over time — measured live from Crossref, in your browser.
Nothing to install, no account, no API key. Nothing you look at is uploaded or stored: each tool reads the public Crossref REST API directly and does the work in the page (requests join Crossref's polite pool). If you can open a web page, you can use them. This guide walks you through a first session end to end.
1932-6203), a Crossref member (publisher) entered as member:ID (e.g. member:340), or an organization's ROR (e.g. ror:04qw24q55). Paste a single DOI to look at one record. Both tools take the same input, and they hand your selection to each other as you go.Work through these in order the first time. It takes about twenty minutes and ends with a concrete list of records to improve.
Type a journal name or ISSN, a member:ID, or a ROR and press Explore. The tool samples the works and scores them against the FAIR use cases that Crossref metadata can express.
Low numbers here are normal. They tell you which parts of the records might be candidates for improvement. See the tool's About tab for the exact Crossref field behind every concept.
Try it on an example publisher (PLOS) →Click any concept name (e.g. Funder). You'll get the real values from the sampled works.
This is one way to spot common values and inconsistencies: several spellings of one funder, or a concept that scores well but holds thin values.
Completeness asks whether a name is present. Connectivity asks whether that name carries the identifier that links it to the rest of the world — an ORCID for a person, a ROR for an affiliation, a Funder Registry ID or ROR for a funder.
Use the Crossref Completeness ⇄ Crossref Connectivity links in the top bar and both tools measure the same selection — target, content type, era, and query travel with the link (a fresh sample of the same population is drawn).
Every bar opens a list of the distinct people, organizations, or funders behind it.
Start with the quick wins (shown first, tagged in yellow). A quick win is an entity that already has an identifier on some works but not all — you don't have to look anything up, just copy what you already have.
In the drill-downs, click Find RORs or Find ORCIDs. Every name that still needs an identifier is handed to the matching retriever automatically.
Organizations and people are routed correctly on their own: an organizational author goes to ROR, a person goes to ORCID. In Crossref that split is structural — an author is a person when it carries given/family and an organization when it carries a name instead.
Scroll to Potential duplicates in Connectivity. It clusters names that look like the same person or organization using fuzzy matching.
This section uses fuzzy matching so it is advisory: it suggests, you decide.
Below the connectivity bars, the Crossref Metadata Evolution section reads Crossref Participation Report for the member — Crossref's coverage numbers, computed over all of the member's records (not the sample above).
crossref.org/members/prep shows ten of these checks; the radar plots all fourteen from the API, adding Affil RORs, Funder RORs, Update policies (Crossmark), and Descriptions.This answers the question a single completeness score can't: have these metadata been improving?
For a finer view, open Crossref History: it samples your works for every deposit year, scores each year with the same FAIR use cases, and plots the trend lines — with a radar grid and a year-by-year movie. Any year's exact sample can be opened in Completeness or Connectivity with one click.
Both tools export. Reports as JSON, HTML, or PDF; the numbers as CSV; charts and the evolution radar as PNG (save or copy straight to the clipboard). Every view is also a plain URL — bookmark it or paste it to a colleague and they'll see exactly what you saw.
For bulk work across many members, the repository also ships companion Python scripts (crossrefParticipation.py, comparePrepConnectivity.py, prepBoxes.py) that harvest Participation Reports and compare them to sampled connectivity.
| Your question | Tool |
|---|---|
| Are the elements I care about present? | Crossref Completeness |
| What values exist in a given element? | Completeness → click a concept |
| Do my authors, affiliations, and funders have ORCIDs and RORs? | Crossref Connectivity |
| Which works should I fix first? | Connectivity → quick wins / To fix |
| What ORCID/ROR should this name have? | ORCID / ROR Retriever |
| Is the same person/organization here under several spellings? | Connectivity → Potential duplicates |
| Are our metadata improving? | Connectivity → Crossref Metadata Evolution |
| How has completeness changed, year by year? | Crossref History |
member:ID target (Crossref publishes these reports per member).Four controls, on both Completeness and Connectivity:
climate).You can also paste a single DOI into the box to look at exactly one work — handy for checking a fix, or for showing colleagues what a well-formed record looks like.
| Term | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Member ID | A Crossref member (usually a publisher), entered as member:340. One member can deposit many journals. |
| ISSN | A journal's identifier, like 1932-6203. Use it to scope a single journal instead of a whole publisher. |
| Content type | The kind of work — journal-article, posted-content (preprint), book-chapter, dataset, grant, and so on. |
| Era | Current = published in the current or two previous calendar years; backfile = published earlier. Crossref's Participation Report definition. |
| Participation Report | Crossref's own coverage numbers for a member (the figures behind crossref.org/members/prep), computed over all a member's records. |
| Occurrence | One appearance of a value. A funder named in 30 works is 30 occurrences. |
| Entity | One distinct person, organization, or funder — however many works it appears in. |
| Quick win | An entity that already has an identifier on some works but not others. Copy it across — no lookup needed. |
| ORCID / ROR | Persistent identifiers for people (ORCID) and organizations (ROR). They're what turn a name into a connection. |
| Funder Registry ID | Crossref's identifier for a funding organization (a Funder Registry DOI); funders increasingly also carry a ROR. |