Your name is “Windows User” and your scientific Paper is called “Microsoft Word – Untitled1”

At least that is what I get from the metadata in your publication.

Google finds about 250’000 of these papers. It gets much worse if you only search for documents called “untitled1”. Not just the documents themselves have this meta-information, but all kinds of conversions, to html, and to pdf as well.

Sometimes, to make the whole thing even more ironic, the publisher has added his own information — but neither the title, nor the author.

Yes, metadata is a kind of a pet issue for me, and I’ve even written about How to Enter EPUB Metadata, apart from also having written Software to fix metadata in PDF- and epub-files (epub-meta/epub-rename and exif-meta/exif-rename. The latter works for PDF; the name comes from exiftool, altough technically the PDF metadata is XMP).

But still, if your paper should be worth anything, it should be worth to be found, and this also means worth being provided with accurate meta-information.

Librarians either work with an ISBN, and if no ISBN can be found (because it was published before 1969, or because no ISBN was ever registered), they need the following to correctly identify a work:

  • Author
  • Title
  • Publishing Year
  • Publisher

So you should take care that at least the first three of those are correctly filled in. If you’re doing a paper or book in the course of your work or study and publish it on the internet, consider entering the university or company as publisher.

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