Citing Datasets
Did you know that datasets can and should be cited just like academic papers? Datasets are foundational research outputs that require immense time, effort, and resources to collect and curate. Treating them as formal citations validates data as an independent scholarly contribution and offers several key benefits: • Credit and Attribution: Formal citations reward data creators with academic recognition, making their intellectual output trackable and measurable. • Transparency and Reproducibility: Citing a dataset – especially pointing to a specific version – allows other researchers to trace the exact evidence base supporting your conclusions. • Persistent Access: Datasets are assigned unique, persistent identifiers (such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) or accession codes),in repositories. This ensures the data remains findable and accessible even if web URLs change over time. • Fostering Future Reuse: It makes it easier for other scientists to discover, repurpose, and integrate existing data to answer new research questions.
For more information on standard data citation formats and how to create DOIs for data visit the DataCite Website.
By Teresa Simoes Steyn