I’m returning from by partcipation at the EuroCRIS 2026 conferece thiking a lot about dissertations and other content types, so I thought it was appropriate to explore the metadata of this content type using Crossref data in the context of Tidy Tuesday1. For that I’ll filter data out to keep only the past quarter (Q1 2026) and only the content type dissertation.
In the following plot let’s explore which region accumulates more DOI deposits and out of those, what is the percetage of dissertations:
Interestingly, Latin America & the Caribbean clearly have deposited more diisertations records than other regions.
One important aspect of the conversation that is not always evident, is that we should also take into account the quality and completeness of the metadata.
We could have 100% of an institution’s production assigned with DOIs and those could also be just persistent IDs, without fully realizing the full potential of the potential of this tool.
Considering this, let’s explore out of a region’s total dissertation records, what’s the percetage of records that includes some of the Crossref recommended metadata2:
As expected, there are complexities in the scholarly record. From the first plot we see that Latin America & the Caribbean is the region that accumulates more dissertations, but each region has paid more attention to specific metadata fields. E.g. Sub-Saharan Africa leads the way with the percentage of dissertations metadata that include references and abstracts.