Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A CRIS record for a grant that stores the award ID, funder identifier, PI ORCID, project period and budget, kept in sync as amendments occur.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A free-text project title typed independently into a funder portal, an institutional CRIS, and a publisher's acknowledgement field, with no shared identifier linking them, is not standardised project metadata even though each system 'has' a record of the project.
Editorial commentary
Project metadata is the structured set of descriptive and administrative fields that identify and describe a funded research project within a CRIS, grants-management system, or funder database — distinct from the research data or outputs the project produces. Typical fields include project title, principal investigator and co-investigators, funder and award identifier, institution, project period (start and end dates), budget, and discipline or subject classification.
Why standardised project metadata matters
Project metadata is what makes a project discoverable and linkable across systems: a funder’s grants database, an institution’s CRIS, and a publisher’s article-metadata record all need to reference the same underlying project consistently for funding acknowledgements, compliance reporting, and research-impact tracking to work without manual reconciliation. Persistent identifiers — a Funder ID for the funding body, an award or grant identifier for the specific project, and an ORCID or organisational identifier for personnel — are what let project metadata be matched reliably across those systems rather than relying on free-text project-title matching, which is error-prone at scale.
Where project metadata is captured
Project metadata is typically first created during proposal submission (pre-award), then updated across the award phase as budget, personnel, or period-of-performance amendments occur, and finalised at close-out. Institutions that treat project metadata as a one-time entry at proposal stage, rather than a record maintained across the full project lifecycle, tend to accumulate stale records that misreport active project counts and complicate funder compliance reporting.
References
- CASRAI Research Information Model (legacy) project-metadata field definitions. 2 CFR Part 200 (Uniform Guidance), reporting requirements.
Also known as
Project metadata record · Project descriptive data · CRIS project record
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Project metadata"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/project-metadata" />{
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"name": "Project metadata",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/project-metadata",
"description": "The structured descriptive and administrative fields -- title, PI, funder, award identifier, project period, budget -- that identify a funded research project within a CRIS, grants system, or funder database.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-lifecycle#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/project-metadata",
"sameAs": [
"Project metadata record",
"Project descriptive data",
"CRIS project record"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
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},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:23:00",
"dateModified": "2026-08-23T05:13:45",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
