How permanent are metadata for research data? Understanding changes in DataCite metadata

Abstract. With the move towards open research information, the DOI registration agency DataCite is increasingly used as a source for metadata describing research data, for example to perform scientometric analyses. However, there is a lack of research on how DataCite metadata describing research data are created and maintained. We address this gap by using DataCite metadata provenance information to analyze the overall prevalence and patterns of change to DataCite metadata records. Metadata change was observed for 12.18% of metadata records in the sample, and change tends to be incremental and not extensive. DataCite metadata records offer reliable descriptions of data sets and are stable enough to be used in scientometric research. The rate of change differs from previous studies of metadata change in other contexts, suggesting that there are differences in metadata practices between research data repositories and more traditional cataloging environments. The observed changes do not seem to fully align with idealized conceptualizations of metadata creation and maintenance for research data. In particular, the data do not show that metadata records are maintained routinely and continuously. Metadata change also has a limited effect on metadata completeness.