Studying Amount of Attention to Metadata in Scientific-Research Journals Based on the Authors' Instructions and Files Uploaded on the Journals' Websites

Purpose: Scientific journals, as sources that provide first-class information to the scientific and research community, are expected to present their best to index and store articles accurately and quickly by search engines and databases. Among them, metadata is the best solution. Using metadata in article files can speed up retrieval appropriately in the semantic web environment. Therefore, the amount of information in the hidden web environment will be reduced, and as a result, the access and citation of articles will increase, and this will lead to the acceleration and improvement of the science dissemination process. Therefore, the current research aims to investigate the use of metadata in scientific journal articles inside and outside the country based on the authors' instructions and files uploaded in three formats: Word, PDF, and HTML.
Method: This research is of a descriptive type and was conducted by a survey method. The research community inside the country includes 90 international journals available on the journal ranking site of the Ministry of Science, Research, and Information Technology. For checking the conditions of entering the research, 50 journals were examined if they have an active page and link. Abroad, the multiplicity and dispersion of the subject created a heterogeneous society for investigation. Therefore, to solve this problem, the journals of three major publishers of scientific journals in different subject areas, namely Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer were selected and included in the study, each of which publishes the number of 2756, 2937, and 3750 journals respectively. The aforementioned publishers had the same publication structure and authors' guidelines for all journals, which made it easier to collect data and homogenize the community. The data collection tool is also a researcher-made checklist with 41 items (questions) in three parts to check Word, PDF files, and HTML. Each of the questions was extracted according to the standards
raised concerning metadata on the website of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The face validity of the checklist was confirmed by a group of professors of the Department of Information Science and Epistemology, and its reliability was confirmed with Cronbach's alpha coefficient
of 0.74.
Findings: Among domestic journals, there are no instructions in the authors' guide for preparing a Word file, and among foreign publishers, only Springer has paid attention to this issue. About the HTML file. Also, none of the internal journals have HTML files, but foreign publishers have paid attention to this issue and have acted according to metadata standards. Also, only a limited number of journals have taken into consideration the metadata requirements that can be implemented by the authors and required the authors to comply with them. The result of the significant analysis of the difference between domestic and foreign journals in components of Word, PDF, and HTML showed the significant value of the Kruskal-Wallis test for PDF files and HTML was less than 0.05 (sig≤0.05), so it can be said that the observed difference regarding the level of metadata compliance in PDF files and H.T.M.L., among domestic and foreign journals, is meaningful; But regarding Word files, the observed difference is not significant and the findings are at the same level.
Conclusion: Measuring the difference between domestic and foreign magazines in the components mentioned in three Word, PDF files, and H.T.M.L. is meaningful. Domestic journals (those that are published internationally and were the target of study in this research) do not pay any attention to these components mentioned in the three files of Word, PDF. and did not have HTML. Only 9 journals published by Springer Publications, because this publisher has a general instruction for all authors, have paid attention to the issue of metadata in Word file setting and include it in PDF files and H.T.M.L. of articles. In general, the attention to metadata and its use among domestic journals is almost zero, and it is necessary to pay serious attention to this issue in order to improve the quality of indexing and access to articles.