  This paper explores the characteristics of DataCite to determine its
possibilities and potential as a new bibliometric data source to analyze the
scholarly production of open data. Open science and the increasing data sharing
requirements from governments, funding bodies, institutions and scientific
journals has led to a pressing demand for the development of data metrics. As a
very first step towards reliable data metrics, we need to better comprehend the
limitations and caveats of the information provided by sources of open data. In
this paper, we critically examine records downloaded from the DataCite's OAI
API and elaborate a series of recommendations regarding the use of this source
for bibliometric analyses of open data. We highlight issues related to metadata
incompleteness, lack of standardization, and ambiguous definitions of several
fields. Despite these limitations, we emphasize DataCite's value and potential
to become one of the main sources for data metrics development.
