It’s been said that Americans are unusual in tending to ask “Where do you work?” as an initial question upon introduction to a new acquaintance, indicating a perhaps unhealthy preoccupation with work as identity. But in the context of published research, “What is this author’s affiliation?” is a question of global importance that goes beyond just wanting to know the name – and perhaps prestige level – of the place a researcher works.
As Crossref membership continues to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate is an important part of our mission. Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many.
We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.
We are very pleased to kick off the New Year with another important schema update and the news that a Grant DOI field is now supported for all record types. This means that Crossref members can explicitly include the Crossref Grant IDs as part of their DOI metadata records for publications and any other output type, accurately linking research outputs to the funding that made it possible, all through metadata. We hope that our members will leverage this to respond to recent calls for stronger funding transparency and best practices for reporting funding sources in research outputs.
Members can participate in Cited-by by completing the following steps:
Deposit references for one or more prefixes as part of your content registration process. Use your Participation Report to see your progress with depositing references. This step is not mandatory, but highly recommended to ensure that your citation counts are complete.
We will match the metadata in the references to DOIs to establish Cited-by links in the database. As new content is registered, we automatically update the citations and, for those members with Cited-by alerts enabled, we notify you of the new links.
Display the links on your website. We recommend displaying citations you retrieve on DOI landing pages, for example:
If you are a member through a Sponsor, you may have access to Cited-by through your sponsor – please contact them for more details. OJS users can use the Cited-by plugin. If you need more help, you can learn more from PKP’s Cited-by (OJS Scopus/Crossref plugin) - as of OJS 3.2, this third-party plugin allows journals to display citations and citation counts (using article DOIs) from Scopus and/or Crossref.
Citation matching
Members sometimes submit references without including a DOI tag for the cited work. When this happens, we look for a match based on the metadata provided. If we find one, the reference metadata is updated with the DOI and we add the "doi-asserted-by": "crossref" tag. If we don’t find a match immediately, we will try again at a later date.
There are some references for which we won’t find matches, for example where a DOI has been registered with an agency other than Crossref (such as DataCite) or if the reference refers to an object without a DOI, including conferences, manuals, blog posts, and some journals’ articles.
To perform matching, we first check if a DOI tag is included in the reference metadata. If so, we assume it is correct and link the corresponding work. If there isn’t a DOI tag, we perform a search using the metadata supplied and select candidate results by thresholding. The best match is found through a further validation process. Learn more about how we match references. The same process is used for the results shown on our Simple Text Query tool.
All citations to a work are returned in the corresponding Cited-by query.
Page maintainer: Isaac Farley Last updated: 2023-April-28
