Help me build the citational metadata infrastructure for Rhet/Comp

The gap runs along publisher lines, not editorial ones

College English has 10,688 records registered with Crossref. Two hundred eighteen of them carry a reference list. For College Composition and Communication the figures are 6,945 and 231. Restrict either journal to the volumes published before 2000 and the count goes to zero: 9,510 articles in College English, 5,544 in CCC, and not one deposited citation between them. College English's Crossref records start in 1939 and CCC's in 1950, so six decades of the field's central conversation are, to anything that reads Crossref, pretty much invisible.

Set those numbers beside Written Communication at 87.5 percent reference coverage, Technical Communication Quarterly at 78.9, the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication at 78.8. The difference isn't really about editorial rigor, and it isn't the quality of the scholarship; instead, it is whether a journal's publisher performs the deposit as a matter of routine. SAGE does. Taylor and Francis does. Elsevier mostly does — Assessing Writing is at 78 percent, Computers and Composition at 64.7. A volunteer-run open-access journal like so many that characterize our field does it when somebody finds the hours . . . which doesn't happen very often.

Marked rows, highlighted on screen, are journals whose reference lists I deposited this year. The DOI percentage measures Crossref registrations against the article count Pinakes has indexed for that journal, which is the closest available stand-in for what a journal has actually published; where Pinakes draws its own records from Crossref the two agree by construction, so read 100% there as “nothing missing that Crossref knows about” rather than as an independent check. An em dash means no article count is available.

Four journals in Rhet/Comp defined broadly now sit at the top of that table

Across the Disciplines deposits reference lists for 91.6 percent of its Crossref records. Double Helix is at 89.4, The Journal of Writing Analytics at 88.5, Open Words at 86.9. All four are small, open access, volunteer-supported, and hosted by the WAC Clearinghouse, and three of the four now deposit at higher rates than any commercial publisher in the same table, with the fourth half a point behind Written Communication and well clear of the rest. Before this spring, not one of them had deposited a single reference list.

Neither had Reflections, which has 655 records in Crossref reaching back to 2000; 395 of them now carry reference lists, 7,464 references in all. Neither had Literacy in Composition Studies, where I serve as an editor and where I completed this work on my own journal before offering it to anyone else's.

• 1,185articles
• 31,053references deposited
• 14,680resolved to a live DOI
• 6journals

Two metadata options

Getting your journal minting DOIs

If your journal has never registered a DOI, this is the foundational half, and it's mostly a matter of paperwork and decisions that I can help you make. I can walk your editorial team through Crossref membership and registration, work out with you what the deposit fees will actually come to before you commit to anything, help you settle on a DOI suffix pattern, and mint DOIs retroactively across your back catalog. The prefix and the credentials stay with your journal throughout, nothing is registered under my name or anybody else's, and your journal keeps full control of the DOIs once they are minted.

Backfilling your reference lists

If your journal already mints DOIs but has never deposited the works cited that go with them, this is the second half, and I'd argue that this is the half with the larger payoff. Crossref accepts reference deposits separately from the original metadata deposit, which means the citations can be added to DOIs that already exist without re-registering anything. I build a scraper tuned to your particular archive, pull the reference list out of every article, match what can be matched against existing DOIs, audit the result by hand, and hand you a validated deposit file that you or I can deposit in a single batch to backfill your journal articles' citational record. So, mint first, backfill second. The two halves run as one continuous process and it's the same pipeline either way, so a journal starting from nothing doesn't take twice as long as a journal starting from DOIs.

What this costs

Nothing, from me. You'll pay Crossref for membership and for the DOIs you register, and I'm glad to help you work out what that comes to before your editorial team or board votes on anything. There's no institutional partnership to negotiate, I'm not affiliated with Crossref in any way, and I'm not selling you software. I am doing this as a service to the discipline in the interest of enhancing our citational record.

I do have a stake in this: Here's what it is.

What I'd need from you to start

A URL. That's genuinely the whole intake — I look at your archive, work out what platform you're on, and tell you what the job looks like and roughly how long it'll take. If the answer is that your journal is already in good shape, I'll tell you that too, and we can discuss any other metadata work that might enhance your journal.

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