MetaRef tells you how complete, discoverable, and reliable your published Crossref metadata actually is — across a journal, a DOI prefix, or your entire publishing portfolio.
No account needed to verify a prefix. Free public Crossref data. Results in minutes.
Every DOI you register carries metadata: titles, authors, ORCID iDs, affiliations, licenses, funding, references, abstracts. That metadata is what indexing services read, what discovery systems surface, and what powers citation linking. When fields are missing or malformed, your articles are harder to find, cite, and trust — and you usually never find out.
Missing ORCID iDs, absent license URLs, and undeposited references quietly weaken discoverability across thousands of articles.
Checking metadata DOI-by-DOI is impossible at journal or publisher scale. There's no dashboard that just shows you.
By the time a metadata problem surfaces, it has already affected years of back content.
Enter a DOI prefix, an ISSN, or a Crossref member ID. MetaRef harvests the matching records from the public Crossref REST API, normalizes the metadata, scores its quality, and renders an interactive dashboard plus a branded, shareable report.
Every record gets a metadata-quality score and an A–F grade across titles, authors, dates, volume/issue, pages, references, licenses, ORCID, affiliations, and abstracts.
Publication trends by year, distribution by journal and type, and field-by-field coverage — see at a glance where your metadata is strong and where it isn't.
Not just "72% reference coverage" — the actual list of which articles are missing references, ORCID iDs, or licenses, exportable to CSV so your team can act today.
Plain-language recommendations, prioritized, each linked to the affected records: "Deposit references for 134 articles," "Collect ORCID iDs at submission."
Enter a DOI prefix (e.g. 10.32649), an ISSN, or a Crossref member ID. MetaRef verifies it and shows the owner and record count before you commit.
Run a quick sample first, then a full harvest. MetaRef pulls every matching record with polite, paginated Crossref requests and stores the raw metadata for a full audit trail.
Records are normalized and scored automatically. Your dashboard populates with trends, coverage charts, quality grades, and problem tables.
Generate the MetaRef Metadata Health Report — branded, printable, shareable — with a prioritized action plan and per-DOI CSV exports.
The flagship Metadata Health Report rolls everything below into a single document. Each area is also available on its own.
Your complete, branded metadata-quality assessment — completeness, identity, citation readiness, open-science signals, integrity — with an action plan.
Which articles have deposited references and which don't — the foundation of Cited-by linking.
Author ORCID iD coverage, including authenticated ORCIDs, across your portfolio.
Whether author affiliations and ROR institution IDs are present in your deposits.
Funder Registry IDs and award numbers — essential for funded-research reporting.
Whether license URLs are deposited and which content versions they cover.
Update-policy coverage and any corrections or retractions recorded in your metadata.
Recently deposited and recently updated records — metadata monitoring at a glance.
Crossref cited-by counts per DOI, for post-publication monitoring.
Audit the metadata quality of the journals your institution publishes, prove discoverability to your stakeholders, and fix gaps before they compound.
Monitor metadata health across every journal and prefix in your portfolio from one dashboard, and turn coverage gaps into a concrete deposit-improvement roadmap.
See exactly which articles are missing references, ORCID iDs, or licenses — and hand your production team a ready-to-work list.
Report on the metadata quality of institutional publishing programs with branded, shareable documents.
A note on scope. MetaRef analyzes the works registered under the scope you choose — a journal, a prefix, or a publisher's Crossref account. That's exactly the right lens for publishing operations and the journals an institution runs itself. It is not a complete map of every paper an institution's researchers have authored — those appear under many external publishers' prefixes. Institution-wide author analysis is on our roadmap via ROR affiliation matching.
Validate what goes in. Audit what's out there.
Entirely from the public Crossref REST API — the same metadata that powers DOI resolution, indexing, and citation linking across the scholarly ecosystem. Nothing is scraped, and no private data is required.
No. MetaRef analyzes works registered under the scope you select (a prefix, ISSN, or Crossref member account). Researchers at an institution publish across many external publishers, so a single scope is not the institution's complete output. Affiliation-based, institution-wide analysis is planned for a future release.
They are Crossref cited-by counts — citations recorded between Crossref-registered works. They are not the same as Scopus, Web of Science, or Google Scholar counts, and we label them clearly everywhere they appear.
A 0–100 score and A–F grade summarizing how complete a record's key metadata fields are — titles, authors, dates, references, licenses, ORCID iDs, and more. It's a fast way to compare records and track improvement over time.
Crossref's reports are free and excellent at the member level. MetaRef adds journal- and prefix-level granularity, plain-language explanations, per-DOI lists of exactly what to fix, and a branded report you can hand to non-specialists.
Verify a prefix or ISSN in seconds. No account, no card — just your first metadata-quality score.