1. How are documents in SSOAR indexed?
Basically, a distinction is made between formal/bibliographic indexing and content indexing. All data which describe an article is known as metadata. Formal indexing comprises data such as the name of the author(s), the title of the contribution, the journal title, and the year and place of publication. Content indexing comprises the description of the document by means of an abstract, keywords and a system of categories by means of which it is also possible to browse in SSOAR. (See FAQ VIII.2: What fields does the online form contain? What metadata is recorded?)
In its current version, SSOAR uses the German, English or Russian Thesaurus for the social sciences and the German or English Social Sciences Classification to assign content keywords. The next step will be a Spanish categorisation.
As a special service for German-speaking authors, further fields and data are recorded by a qualified documentation officer. This service includes the assignment of keywords, categories and possibly the insertion of an abstract, if the author hasn't already done so. Such content-related data makes the document easier to retrieve.
2. What fields does the online form contain? What metadata is recorded?
At SSOAR we distinguish between seven different types of document (see list below). There is a separate, albeit similar, online form for each of these document types. Each form contains fields which are important for the indexing of the document. The most significant differences are:
1. Monographs: A monograph always has one or more authors and one title.
2. Journal contributions: In contrast to the online form for a monograph or a collective volume, the online form for a journal contribution contains fields relating to the journal in which the article appeared.
3. Reviews: As a special type of journal article, the metadata for a review also includes information on the reviewed work.
4. Contributions to collective volumes: The metadata for a contribution to a collective volume includes both information on the individual contribution (author, title) and on the collective volume (editor(s), title) in which it appears.
5. Collective volumes: The main difference between the online form for a collective volume and for a monograph is that the collective volume is edited by an editor or a team of editors.
6. Discussion papers, research reports etc (authors' volumes): see details for monographs under (1) above.
7. Discussion papers, research reports etc (edited volumes): see details for collective volumes under (5) above.
When the data you enter is processed by our documentation staff, further information will be added to facilitate a precise search and presentation and to establish a link with other resources. This data includes the language in which the document is written, method-related keywords (where a specific research method was used by the author) and other internal details.
You are asked about the licensing rights for the document at the beginning of the self-archiving procedure.
3. Must all the metadata be provided?
Some of the data is optional, some is compulsory. The compulsory fields on the online form are marked with an asterix (*). (See FAQ VII.2: Why should I use the online form to deposit my document?) Although it takes longer to enter both the optional and the compulsory metadata, it is worth the extra effort. The better a text is indexed, the easier it is to search it via the search and browser functions and the more useful it is for everyday scholarly work where a large amount of information has to be searched for and processed.
