If your journal is contributing article-level metadata to DOAJ, you should probably check to see if the year of publication is being noted correctly. Based on data gathered last year, it appears that article counts by publication year by journal significantly under-represent the actual journal content, and based on a more recent cursory search of DOAJ and e-mail with DOAJ’s community manager Dom, it appears that a fairly recent change in metadata harvesting at DOAJ has increased the disparity.
Here is how to check for your journal:
From a DOAJ Advanced Search Screen
- Under journals vs. articles (left hand side of the screen) select Articles
- In the main search area across the top of the screen, use the drop-down menu that starts with Search all, select Article: Journal Title and enter the title of your journal as the search term
- On the left-hand side of the screen, expand Year of Publication
If the publication numbers by year in DOAJ do not match your journal’s publication numbers, check the DOAJ For Publishers page for information on what to do next. If you have any questions, please send them to DOAJ feedback. If you have tips for other publishers to resolve this issue, feel free to add a comment to this post. Feel free to add questions too, just note that I won’t be able to help.
To illustrate the scope of the problem
A DOAJ Advanced Search for “articles” with no search terms or limits with the Year of Publication expanded yields the following results for the past 4 years:
2015 (11)
2014 (37388)
2013 (183470)
2012 (211728)
It is far more likely that the nearly ten-fold decrease in publication numbers from 2012 to 2014 reflects the difference in ingestion of metadata than an actual decrease in publication numbers in DOAJ journals.
How did I notice this? I’ve been doing some analysis of content in DOAJ. As of last May, the number of articles identified via publication year appears to have been considerably understated for many journals. For example, a search of the World Journal of Gastroenterology for 2004 – 2013 yielded a total of 23,000 articles while the DOAJ results for this journal for these years was only 5,901. 1,047 articles were identified as published in 2013. A DOAJ search for World Journal of Gastroenterology today, almost exactly a year later, still yields exactly 5,901 articles total for this journal. The Year of Publication option on the left-hand side of the screen lists 2012 as the most recent year, while the results show articles published in 2013.
Cite as:
Morrison, H. (2015). Tech tip for DOAJ journals contributing article-level metadata. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/06/tech-tip-for-doaj-journals-contributing-article-level-metadata/
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs 
Dear Heather,
I think the count on DOAJ is pretty correct if the Publisher delivers metadata correctly. It can always happen that a Publishers re-submits the one or the other paper if the first submission was erroneous. I found in the past that it is not so easy to delete an entry from DOAJ (I had to ask the staff members). So actually the article count on DOAJ, including those resubmissions, is usually lsightly higher than on the Publisher website.
Examples:
International Journal of Molecular Sciences (DOAJ versus –> Publisher website)
2014 (1469) –> 1435
2013 (1373) –> 1367
2012 (1124) –> 1082
2011 (632) –> 631
2010 (339) –> 339
etc.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (DOAJ versus –> Publisher website)
2014 (786) –> 779
2013 (454) –> 454
2012 (307) –> 306
2011 (277) –> 277
2010 (268) –> 267
etc.
About the “World Journal of Gastroenterology” mentioned in your blog post, I have yet another article count based on CrossRef doi deposits. You can access its article number stats based on CrossRef doi deposits here (the CrossRef-based count is quite different from the DOAJ count, yet seems closer to DOAJ than the number you report based on the Publisher website): http://sciforum.net/statistics/journal/articles/13016
Journal: World Journal of Gastroenterology
Partly open access
Current Publisher: Baishideng Publishing Group Co (doi prefix: 10.3748), 2004-2015
Year: :2004-2015
ISSN / EISSN: 10079327 / –
Total articles: ≅8’184
Indexing: SCOPUS – (1998-) PUBMED – (2001-) MEDLINE – (2001-) MEDICUS – (2001-) PMC SCIE EBSCO
Archiving: SHERPA/ROMEO (gray)
Please also note that one of the major open access publishers, namely PLoS, does not deliver article-level metadata to DOAJ since quite a while. PLoS published around 36K and 35K articles in 2013 and 2014 respectively. Probably the view here is more realistic (yet, it does only count OA papers that have a doi number registered and deposited to CrossRef):
http://sciforum.net/statistics/open-access-papers-published-per-year
Best,
Dietrich
A couple of comments to clarify your post:
“Based on data gathered last year, it appears that article counts by publication year by journal significantly under-represent the actual journal content, and based on a more recent cursory search of DOAJ and e-mail with DOAJ’s community manager Dom, it appears that a fairly recent change in metadata harvesting at DOAJ has increased the disparity.”
Dom: When you say the actual journal content, I presume you mean the journal article counts in DOAJ? In a way yes, this is under-represented but actually what we are showing in DOAJ now is a truer picture of the data than we were showing before. The greater disparity is because we no longer include any noise in these figures. Where we can identify a correct Year value, we include it in the count. When we can’t identify a Year value, we ignore it. Unfortunately, we see publishers uploading all sorts of values in the Year field: anything from typos (201, 2103, 2066 etc) to Roman numerals.
“If the publication numbers by year in DOAJ do not match your journal’s publication numbers, check the DOAJ For Publishers page for information on what to do next.”
Dom: this URL https://doaj.org/publishers#correct
“If you have any questions, please send them to DOAJ feedback. If you have tips for other publishers to resolve this issue, feel free to add a comment to this post. Feel free to add questions too, just note that I won’t be able to help.”
Dom: Absolutely, do send us your questions: feedback@doaj.org. In most cases, we will ask publishers to re-upload their metadata with the correct Year of Publication. DOAJ can’t correct this metadata for you. We have no way of manually changing metadata or of knowing what the correct values should be. If the full-text URLs of the articles that you are correcting have not changed then there is no need to contact us first: you can simply upload the new metadata.