ArticlePLoS biology2017
Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data.
Abstract read
In one paragraph
Article in PLoS biology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 62 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
62citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
62 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Integrating multi-omics technologies to decipher microbiome functions.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The Cell Ontology in the age of single-cell omics.Scientific data · 2026Article
- ClarID: a human-readable and compact identifier specification for biomedical metadata integration.Journal of biomedical semantics · 2026Article
- Childhood Cancer Data Initiative Participant Index: Mapping Pediatric Cancer Data to Facilitate Cross-Study Integrated Analysis.JCO clinical cancer informatics · 2026Article
- Article
- Assessing the adoption of the FAIR principles in Italian environmental research infrastructures.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- herbUA Collectors: An open-source framework for online publication of the herbarium collector-centric data.Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- Towards an AI biomedical scientist: Accelerating discoveries in neurodegenerative disease.The journal of prevention of Alzheimer's disease · 2025Article
- Infectious, Allergic, and Immune-Mediated Disease Data Resources: a Landscape Overview and Subset Assessment.Journal of medical systems · 2025Review
- ClarID: A Human-Readable and Compact Identifier Specification for Biomedical Metadata Integration.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Opening doors to physical sample tracking and attribution in Earth and environmental sciences.Scientific data · 2025Article
- A Standardized Nomenclature Design for Systematic Referencing and Identification of Animal Cellular Material.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- The challenges of research data management in cardiovascular science: a DGK and DZHK position paper-executive summary.Clinical research in cardiology : official journal of the German Cardiac Society · 2024Review
- Evaluating FAIR Digital Object and Linked Data as distributed object systems.PeerJ. Computer science · 2024Article
- PhyloSophos: a high-throughput scientific name mapping algorithm augmented with explicit consideration of taxonomic science, and its application on natural product (NP) occurrence database processing.BMC bioinformatics · 2023Article
- Assessing resolvability, parsability, and consistency of RDF resources: a use case in rare diseases.Journal of biomedical semantics · 2023Article
- Subjective data models in bioinformatics and how wet lab and computational biologists conceptualise data.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Ten quick tips for harnessing the power of ChatGPT in computational biology.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
2 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
44 authors.
Julie A McMurryDepartment of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology and OHSU Library, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon, United States of America.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9353-5498
Nick JutyEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Niklas BlombergELIXIR Hub, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Tony BurdettEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Tom ConlinDepartment of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology and OHSU Library, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon, United States of America.
Nathalie ConteEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Mélanie CourtotEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
John DeckBerkeley Natural History Museums, University of California at Berkeley, Berkely, California, United States of America.
Michel DumontierInstitute of Data Science, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Donal K FellowsSchool of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Alejandra Gonzalez-BeltranOxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Philipp GormannsInstitute of Experimental Genetics, Helmholtz Centre Munich, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg, Germany.
Jeffrey GretheCenter for Research in Biological Systems, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America.
Janna HastingsBabraham Institute, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Jean-Karim HérichéEuropean Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany.
Henning HermjakobEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Jon C IsonCenter for Biological Sequence Analysis, Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark.
Rafael C JimenezEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Simon JuppEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
John KunzeCalifornia Digital Library, Oakland, California, United States of America.
Camille LaibeEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Nicolas Le NovèreBabraham Institute, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
James MaloneEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Maria Jesus MartinEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Johanna R McEntyreEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Chris MorrisScience and Technology Facilities Council, Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington, United Kingdom.
Juha MuiluGenomics Coordination Center, Department of Genetics, University Medical Center Groningen and Groningen Bioinformatics Center, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands.
Wolfgang MüllerScientific Databases and Visualization at Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Heidelberg, Germany.
Philippe Rocca-SerraOxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Susanna-Assunta SansoneOxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Murat SariyarInstitute for Medical Informatics, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Information Technology, Bern, Switzerland.
Jacky L SnoepManchester Institute of Biology, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Stian Soiland-ReyesSchool of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Natalie J StanfordSchool of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Neil SwainstonManchester Centre for Synthetic Biology of Fine and Speciality Chemicals, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Nicole WashingtonEnvironmental Genomics and Systems Biology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
Alan R WilliamsSchool of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Sarala M WimalaratneEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Lilly M WinfreeDepartment of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology and OHSU Library, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon, United States of America.
Katherine WolstencroftLeiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands.
Carole GobleSchool of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Christopher J MungallEnvironmental Genomics and Systems Biology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
Melissa A HaendelDepartment of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology and OHSU Library, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon, United States of America.
Helen ParkinsonEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Funding
Gene Ontology ConsortiumP41HG002273 · NHGRI · JACKSON LABORATORY · PI BLAKE, JUDITH A · 2004 to 2011
$27.4MUniProt: A centralized protein sequence and function resourceU41HG007822 · NHGRI · EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY LABORATORY · PI BATEMAN, ALEX · 2014 to 2017
$21.9MNIDDK Network Coordinating UnitU24DK097771 · NIDDK · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO · PI Shuibing Chen, Jeffrey S. Grethe · 2013 to 2026
$20.9MThe Monarch Initiative: Linking Diseases to Model Organism ResourcesR24OD011883 · OD · UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL · PI HAENDEL, MELISSA A, MUNGALL, CHRISTOPHER J · 2012 to 2024
$16.0MTrainingU54AI117925 · NIAID · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · PI MUSEN, MARK A · 2014 to 2018
$12.9MBioCADDIE: Biomedical and healthCAre Data Discovery and Indexing Engine centerU24AI117966 · NIAID · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO · PI OHNO-MACHADO, LUCILA · 2014 to 2016
$10.9MOPERATION, SUPPORT AND STRATEGIC ENHANCEMENT OF THE NEUROSCIENCE INFORMATION FRAMEWORKU24DA039832 · NIDA · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO · PI GRETHE, JEFFREY S., MARTONE, MARYANN E · 2015 to 2016
$2.0MBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BB/E006248/1Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BB/E025080/1Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BB/K019783/1Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BB/M017702/1Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BBS/E/B/000C0419NHGRI NIH HHS P41 HG002273NHGRI NIH HHS U41 HG007822NIAID NIH HHS U24 AI117966NIAID NIH HHS U54 AI117925NIDA NIH HHS U24 DA039832NIDDK NIH HHS U24 DK097771NIH HHS R24 OD011883
Abstract
In many disciplines, data are highly decentralized across thousands of online databases (repositories, registries, and knowledgebases). Wringing value from such databases depends on the discipline of data science and on the humble bricks and mortar that make integration possible; identifiers are a core component of this integration infrastructure. Drawing on our experience and on work by other groups, we outline 10 lessons we have learned about the identifier qualities and best practices that facilitate large-scale data integration. Specifically, we propose actions that identifier practitioners (database providers) should take in the design, provision and reuse of identifiers. We also outline the important considerations for those referencing identifiers in various circumstances, including by authors and data generators. While the importance and relevance of each lesson will vary by context, there is a need for increased awareness about how to avoid and manage common identifier problems, especially those related to persistence and web-accessibility/resolvability. We focus strongly on web-based identifiers in the life sciences; however, the principles are broadly relevant to other disciplines.
Indexed as
SoftwareSoftware DesignBiological Science DisciplinesComputational BiologyDatabases, FactualData MiningForecastingHumansInternet
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390
Registered trials
None linked
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.