Building Confidence with Research Metadata at Scale: A Hands-on DataCite REST API Workshop for PID4NFDI

This deposit contains the complete materials from the PID4NFDI online workshop "Building Confidence with Research Metadata at Scale: A Hands-on DataCite REST API Workshop", delivered on 15 June 2026.

The workshop introduced research-data managers, repository staff, data stewards and librarians to the DataCite REST API as a practical tool for assessing and improving metadata quality at scale, with no programming or terminal use required.

The core idea is that every metadata KPI can be expressed as one of two queries a present query (field:*) and a missing query (-(field:*))  and read off meta.total. Participants worked through their own repositories in the browser, scoping queries with client-id, building present/missing questions for licences, ORCIDs, affiliations and funders, turning counts into distributions with facets, and exporting result sets for downstream reporting.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the workshop, participants are able to:

• scope a DataCite API query to their own repository using client-id;
• ask present/missing questions about any DataCite metadata field;
• read meta.total as the number that answers a KPI question;
• turn one number into a distribution by enabling facets;
• export a result set as JSON or a single record in a citation format via content negotiation; and
• explain the difference between Commons (clickable), the Dashboard (snapshot completeness) and the API (precise queries + missing-records worklists).

Audience

Beginners: research-data and repository staff, data stewards, librarians, curators. No prior coding required; the entire workshop runs in a web browser.

How to reuse this material

The materials are released so other communities can run the same workshop or adapt the activities for their own training. The workbook is structured so each task is one URL the participant edits, which makes it easy to localise to a single repository or research area.

Related work

• DataCite Metadata Monitoring Framework v1.1 the KPI definitions that the workshop is built around — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19659989
• DataCite Metadata Schema v4.7 https://schema.datacite.org/
• DataCite REST API documentation https://support.datacite.org/docs/api
• DataCite Commons (clickable counterpart) https://commons.datacite.org
• DataCite Metadata Dashboard https://metadata.datacite.org