Our Experts collected examples of Authority Files and in the resulting report, explain the beneficial value of Authority Files with regards to discovery, trust and reliability, accountability, transactional efficiency for knowledge creation.
Authority Files or Controlled Vocabularies are lists of entities, i.e. publications, journals, data collections, organisations, etc. The lists are uniquely identified by a number or identifiers such as ORCID for researchers, DOI for publications, ISBN for books, and contain information to characterise and qualify the entities (if a journal is Open Access, which researcher contributed to a specific project, etc.)
The lists are authoritative, either maintained by an expert organisation, registry office, etcetera; or authoritative in itself being widely recognised and used by significant audiences, etc.