Providing appropriate metadata to describe chemical data is essential to its discovery and use. Unfortunately, in the chemical sciences there is a paucity of practical standards for conveying this information. This is partially due to breadth and complexity of the fields, but also to skill of scientists and engineers in working with existing sets of incomplete and inconsistent information. Metadata is often included in the text of the publication where the data originated. While useful for the person who wishes to use the data, it often does not help people discover the data in the first place. This is not a new problem. Issues with chemical nomenclature have given rise to tools to help identify papers which refer to a given chemical species: curated registries and the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier. Unfortunately, identification of chemical species is only one part of a larger problem. Fortunately, there are incentives to improving metadata for discovery: authors get more citations, publishers get more sales, and funding agencies see more impact from the original work. This suggests that if the cost is not high, it may be possible to improve discovery by making more metadata available to the public in a structured manner. This talk will suggest some incremental improvements in the provision of metadata based on over 20 years of experience in publishing chemical data on the Internet.

Documenting chemical data

256th National Meeting (2018)

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