Event Data

Event Data — open for your interpretation

Publisher metadata is one side of the story surrounding research outputs, but conversations—and ideas that build further around scholarly research—take place all over the web. So we built a service that captures and records these ‘Events’. Events are comments, links, shares, bookmarks, references, etc. These help tell the fuller story of how research connects.

Led by Crossref as a community-governed not-for-profit organization, Event Data provides open, transparent, and traceable information about the provenance and context of every Event.

Metadata + Event Data = A fuller picture.

How it works

When someone links their data online, or mentions research on, for example, Twitter, Wikipedia, or Reddit, we capture that Event and make it available for anyone to use in their own way.

We provide the unprocessed data—you decide how to use it. This is key as people have different questions to answer, different businesses, and different interpretations. For example, the same data, within the framework of your organization, can have its own unique meaning; does a tweet hold the same value as a retweet for you? Why should Crossref decide? You know which data points are meaningful for you. You also might want to build or use a tool to process, evaluate, or visualize the data.

Where the data comes from


Data source Event type
Cambia Lens Citations in Patents
Crossref Metadata Links to DataCite registered content
DataCite Metadata Links to Crossref registered content
Hypothes.is Annotations in Hypothes.is
Newsfeed Discussed in blogs and media
Reddit Discussed on Reddit
Reddit Links Discussed on sites linked to in subreddits
Stack Exchange Network Discussed on StackExchange sites
Twitter Mentions in tweets
Wikipedia References on Wikipedia pages
Wordpress.com Discussed on Wordpress.com sites

Who is it for?

Event Data is for anyone who wants to build tools to enable their organization to see ‘a fuller picture’—or, focus in on any specific pixel of that picture. For example, Event Data could be used to map the intensity and location of discussion around an item of research, to develop measurements for, evaluate, and interpret research engagement or perhaps to track reach, and could be used by:

Publishers and publishing platforms can analyze and interpret our data collection and can use the Event records to undertake metric-lead analysis to help drive business needs.

Service providers can enrich, analyze, interpret and report via their own tools.

Bibliometricians can use as the underlying data for their research.

Journal editors can use our records to quickly find reviewers based on publication network analysis, identify new areas to grow author submissions and track the reach of submissions selected for publication. In addition, our records can track the full-scope of article dissemination and gain a better understanding of how the publications they manage compare to each other.

Funders can use the data to track the dissemination and usage of the research they funded - outside of the scholarly literature.

Anyone interested in evaluating, using, and visualizing information provided in Event Data

How to participate

Jump on and explore where you can go with Event Data, and what product or service you might want to build with it. If you want some guidance there is comprehensive documentation together with example queries.

Obligations & fees

Event Data is a public API, giving access to raw data, and there are no fees. In the future we will introduce a service-based offering with additional features and benefits, which will have a fee set by our Membership & Fees committee.

Please contact our outreach team with any questions or ideas to discuss.

Last Updated: 2018 September 13 by Christine Buske