The document analyzes metadata usage in 123 Latin American electronic journals. It finds that 87% of journals have some metadata, but only 45% have non-automatic metadata and 13% use Dublin Core metadata. Basic descriptors like titles, abstracts and keywords are present in most articles, but are rarely marked as metadata. Metadata is often only in the national language despite non-national languages being used. Training editors on metadata standards could help visibility and indexing of articles.

1. Metadata Usage Tendencies in Latin American Electronic Journals Rolando Coto-Solano Helena Francke Saray Córdoba-González ELPUB 2009 Milan, Italy

7. How many journals have metadata (on any level) Total Journals 123 (100%) Have any metatags 107 (87%) Have any non-automatic metatags 55 (45%) Have DC metatags 16 (13%)

8. Journals in Costa Rica and Argentina use DC tags significantly more frequently than the rest of the countries in the sample, 66% and 35% respectively (p < 0.05). Brazil also presents a high usage of DC tags in its journals: 17%. This might be due to training provided to the editors by scientific institutions in the country (more on this in the Conclusions section).

9. Presence of basic descriptors in the articles(title, abstract, keywords, author affiliation) Total articles 123 (100%) Has a title 123 (100%) Has author affilliation 105 (85%) Has an abstract 103 (84%) Has keywords 95 (77%) Has title marked as metadata 17 (14%) Has author affilliation marked as metadata 5 (4%) Has abstract marked as metadata 9 (7%) Has keywords marked as metadata 8 (7%)

10. More engineering and medical sciences journals use keywords than do journals in other areas. Medical sciences journals use significantly more abstracts than journals in other areas. (96% of the medical journals use abstracts). Journals in Arts and Humanities use significantly less abstracts and keywords than journals in other areas (73% use abstracts and 64% use keywords). (An interesting find is that, contrary to what could be expected, journals in the Exact and Natural Sciences and in Social Sciences are not significantly different in their use of abstracts and keywords. (For example, 70% of Exact and Natural Sciences journals use keywords; 71% of the Social Sciences journals use keywords). This will have to be verified in further studies).

11. Presence of basic descriptors (title, abstract, keywords, author affiliation) Total articles 123 (100%) Has title in English 54 (44%) Has abstract in English 88 (72%) Has keywords in English 87 (71%) 13% of the articles were written in English

12. Most used metatags Cover (n = 55) Table of contents (n = 42) keywords (58%) keywords (60%) description (58%) description (57%) author (27%) robots (31%) robots (26%) author (26%) Article presentation page (n = 20) Full text page in HTML (n = 16) DC.Language (50%) keywords (50%) DC.Title (50%) description (50%) DC.Description (45%) author (25%) DC.Type (45%) robots (18%) Article presentation pages are salient in their use of DC tags. This might be due to the fact that, if the journal uses article presentation pages at all (a practice that is not very common in Latin America), then the editor could have also become aware of other “good practices” in larger publishing cultures, such as use of DC.

13. Actual output formats: (X)HTML vrs PDF About 7% are specified as XHTML. However, we only found one ( Electronic Journal of Biotechnology ) that offered access to an actual XML-marked copy. (Systems such as SciELO and RedALyC do offer XML copies of their articles). (X)HTML 33 (27%) PDF 105 (85%) Both (X)HTML and PDF 17 (14%)

14.   Contents of the tag <title>

15. Contents of the tag <title> on the Cover level Journal title 93 (76%) Institution Name 24 (20%) Issue Information 2 (2%) Have a cover 122 (100%) None of the above 10 (8%) Two or more of the above 9 (7%)

16. Contents of the tag <title> on the Full Text HTML page Journal title 14 (42%) Institution Name 12 (36%) Issue Information 5 (15%) Have a full text page 33 (100%) Two or more of the above 4 (12%) Article title 14 (42%) Author name 4 (12%) None of the above 1 (3%) Both title and author’s name 0 (0%)