Metadata is a description of a dataset, and it is therefore an essential part of research data as well as any publication results. There are common recommendations how to describe research procedures and data, you can use documents from this web page. Users can find and utilize other schemes, for example, here. We use metadata to accurately describe the particular file so that it conforms to FAIR principles (see the Open Data tab). Metascience is then its own scientific discipline. In 2023, it was the subject of a global conference in Washington, D.C. (https://metascience.info/).
Metadata can be subdivided into:
- administrative,
- descriptive,
- structural.
Practical examples of this division from different disciplines (political science, physics, or medicine) can be found on the page "How to make your data FAIR": https://howtofair.dk/how-to-fair/metadata/. How to find out and verify that our data is really "FAIR"? For example, using this document as a checklist. Platform https://www.fairsfair.eu/ is available to support FAIR principles and data “fairification.”
If you would like to get a quick introduction to metadata, we recommend watching a short four-minute video at this link: https://youtu.be/fZWg0ClQkYQ.
The issue of metadata is dynamic and rapidly evolving. That is why we will keep you informed about various metadata standards and update this page regularly.
