Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A journal article output in Pure linked to its DOI, its authors' ORCID iDs, its host journal, its funder, and its repository deposit.
- Is an instance
A dataset output in DSpace-CRIS linked to a DataCite DOI and the associated project.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A grant award is not a research output — it is a funding activity preceding outputs.
- Not an instance
An internal seminar with no recorded artefact is not a research output in the CRIS sense.
- Not an instance
A researcher's CV line describing a talk with no linked identifier or record is not an output entity, only a claim about one.
Editorial commentary
Research output is the entity around which a CRIS most often interacts with the outside world: publications are harvested from Crossref, Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed; datasets are linked from DataCite; software from GitHub or Software Heritage; outputs are deposited into institutional repositories; outputs feed national assessment exercises. The CRIS records the output once and projects it into many downstream consumers. Output typology is typically built on COAR Resource Types or on a national typology mapped to it.
Typical output types and typology
A CRIS output typology commonly distinguishes journal article, conference paper, book, book chapter, dataset, software, patent, performance/exhibition (for creative-practice research), and thesis, each carrying its own required metadata (a dataset needs a DataCite-style rights statement and access level; a patent needs jurisdiction and grant date). The COAR Controlled Vocabulary for Resource Type Genres is the most widely reused external typology, letting institutions map local output types onto a shared vocabulary for cross-institutional harvesting (for example by OpenAIRE).
Lifecycle inside a CRIS
A typical output record moves through: automated harvest or manual entry → a researcher “claim” step confirming authorship → enrichment with identifiers (DOI, ORCID for each author, ROR for each affiliation) → optional deposit into a linked repository → exposure on public portals and inclusion in institutional/national reporting.
How this differs from the general entity model
This entry is scoped to one entity type. For the full entity-relationship model a CRIS is built on — Person, OrgUnit, Project, Funding, and how Publication/output relates to each of them — see Research entity (CRIS). Use this page when the question is specifically about output harvesting, typology, or lifecycle; use that one for the broader data-model question.
What this is not
A research output record is not the deposited file itself — that lives in a linked repository — and it is not the same as an award or activity record, which precedes outputs rather than representing one.
References
- COAR, ‘Controlled Vocabulary for Resource Type Genres’ (vocabularies.coar-repositories.org/resource_types).
Also known as
Output (CRIS)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Research output (CRIS)"
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"name": "Research output (CRIS)",
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"description": "In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a discrete product of research — a publication, dataset, software release, patent, performance, exhibition, or other recognised output — recorded with its own identifier, type, date, contributors, and relationships to people, organisations, and projects.",
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],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
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},
"author": {
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},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:14:38",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T15:38:08",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
