Alternate IDs

The GESIS Data Catalogue in version 2.0 may document alternate identifiers (Alternate IDs) for a study. The IDs may have been created by different institutions. All IDs point to the same object (study), but only the primary ID should be used for citation.

Further Information about Alternate IDs

The description of alternate identifiers for a study followes the specification of the DataCite Metadata Schema (Starr et. al 2013). The following information is displayed by the DBK, if available:

AlternateIdentifier	An identifier other than the primary Identifier applied to the study. This may be any alphanumeric string which is unique within its domain of issue. May be used for local identifiers. AlternateIdentifier should be used for another identifier of the same instance.
alternateIdentifierType	The type of the AlternateIdentifier (free text). alternateIdentifierType is mandatory.
VersionNumber	Number of the version of the study to which the relatedIdentifier is attached to (optional).

Note about the usage of DOIs in the Data Catalogue:

All studies in the Data Catalogue do get a DOI for each version of the data file. This DOI has the prefix "10.4232" and is used for citation purposes. In exceptional cases a dataset may already have a primary ID, when the study is archived at the GESIS Data Archive. In these cases the primary ID is used for citation and the DOI of the Data Catalogue will be displayed as AlternateID.

For further information see Starr, Joan; Ashton, Jan; Barton, Amy; Elliott, Jannean; Jacquemot-Perbal, Marie-Christine; Karjalainen, Merja; McAvoy, Lynne; Newbold, Elizabeth; Peters, Sebastian; de Smaele, Madeleine; Schleinstein, Natalija; Zenk-Möltgen, Wolfgang; Ziedorn, Frauke (2013): DataCite metadata schema for the publication and citation of research data: Version 3.0. DOI:10.5438/0008.