Evaluating metadata quality in institutional academic repositories of Turkish research universities

Purpose This study aims to address the gap in metadata quality assessment within Institutional Academic Repositories (IARs) at Turkish research universities by comprehensively analyzing the current status of key elements such as completeness, consistency, and accuracy. Additionally, the study proposes a novel approach for evaluating metadata quality, offering valuable insights and recommendations to improve the management and organization of metadata in IARs. Design/methodology/approach This study employed a stratified sampling technique to determine the quantity of data from 21 research universities to be evaluated. The study evaluated 656 resources in the IARs of research universities in Turkey and 3,280 metadata belonging to these resources. In the evaluation and analysis phase, the content analysis technique was employed to assess the quality of the metadata in the IARs, specifically in terms of accuracy, completeness, and consistency, across the fields of author’s name, title, language, type, and publication date. Findings In the study, inconsistent, inaccurate, and incomplete source metadata definitions were identified in the IARs of research universities in Turkey. Accordingly, there are capitalization and punctuation errors in metadata fields, incomplete metadata entries, item fields not entered in the system, incorrect information, spelling differences, and abbreviation usage problems. The study’s findings show that the accuracy criterion is the most common problem in metadata fields. Originality/value This study offers both theoretical and practical implications for future research on metadata quality in IARs. It sheds light on the current state of these repositories by focusing on metadata issues related to the completeness, consistency, and accuracy of resources in IARs at research universities in Turkey.