The tables in this data release provide measures of quality for each of 304,643 records in the Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) database, located at https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ describing mineral resources worldwide but focusing on those located in the United States. One table provides the measures of quality, the other provides the overall record scores that may be used to sort records by overall quality. MRDS is distributed from USGS in several different formats for the convenience of a variety of different users. For example a flattened version of the database is available in which the one-to-many relationships in MRDS are suppressed by combining them into a single field, resulting in a subset of the data that can be viewed, albeit confusingly, in a spreadsheet. The underlying database is relational with about 35 linked tables. That was the source used in this analysis. The measures of quality were obtained from an analysis of the fully relational form of MRDS, in which each record of MRDS is represented by many rows of a variety of tables in the database. The tables of the fully relational form of MRDS are described in detail at https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/full/about.php. MRDS records describe individual mineral resources. This analysis is intended to separate records that describe those resources well and are trustworthy from those that lack fundamental information or cannot be verified easily. The results of the analysis assign to each MRDS record a grade from A to E, where A records are judged the most informative and reliable and E records the least informative and reliable. Code used to carry out the analysis is included to help users understand the procedure used.

The tables in this data release provide measures of quality for each of 304,643 records in the Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) database, located at https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ describing mineral resources worldwide but focusing on those located in the United States. One table provides the measures of quality, the other provides the overall record scores that may be used to sort records by overall quality. MRDS is distributed from USGS in several different formats for the convenience of a variety of different users. For example a flattened version of the database is available in which the one-to-many relationships in MRDS are suppressed by combining them into a single field, resulting in a subset of the data that can be viewed, albeit confusingly, in a spreadsheet. The underlying database is relational with about 35 linked tables. That was the source used in this analysis. The measures of quality were obtained from an analysis of the fully relational form of MRDS, in whi ...