A structured summary containing essential metadata describing a research investigation and/or the research outputs that have resulted from it, for example datasets and journal articles, structured according to some minimal information standard. Such a structured summary can be embodied in both human-readable and machine-readable manifestations, e.g. HTML and RDF. Such a structured summary differs from the Abstract of a journal article, in that the latter is written as a piece of continuous prose, but typically omits vital factual information about the investigation, such as when and where it was conducted, by whom, and on now many specimens or subjects.