The Case for Better Data Citation Practices?

An excellent question came up on ecoinformatics list today on data citation from Kyle Kwaiser at the Michigan Biological Station

I am working with graduate students this summer to archive their work at our field station. I want to tell them to cite their datasets on their CV’s but I know this is not yet the norm.

Any general thoughts on how close we are to including datasets on CV’s? Can you suggest recent papers that argue (decisively) for this practice? Here are two relevant but slightly tangential examples:

  • Reichman, O. J., M. B. Jones, and M. P. Schildhauer. 2011. “Challenges and Opportunities of Open Data in Ecology.” Science 331 (6018) (February): 703-705.
  • Vision, Todd J. 2010. “Open Data and the Social Contract of Scientific Publishing.” BioScience 60 (5) (May): 330-331.

I gave a look over my Mendeley archives on the topic to come up with a few more. As this question seemed of interest to the FriendFeed groups ((yeah, so I was probably supposed to post this in G+, but not everyone can access that yet, right?)) I thought I’d take the liberty to share there. Unfortunately comments can’t be formatted, so I’m adding my list here. Tried to include the relevant quote from the article unless that would mean quoting the whole thing. Will try and polish a bit later.

References arguing for Data Citation

  • Mons et al’s piece is essentially an argument for data citation (Mons et. al. 2011)
  • Birney et al: “another would be to track the usage and citation of data sets using electronic systems similar to those used for traditional publications” and cite this in support: Sharing Data from Large-scale Biological Research Projects: A System of Tripartite Responsibility (Wellcome Trust, 2003); available here
  • “Providing a secure but flexible cyberinfrastructure while promulgating best practices such as data citation and metadata reuse, will help build confidence in data sharing”(Tenopir et. al. 2011)
  • Rod discusses data citation quite a bit in print (Page, 2010)
  • “By ensuring that data remain curated at the source, and by showing the importance of data sharing to promote data citation and usage, we have grown past our original technology implementation and are ready to move into a long-term production environment that departs from the original model.”(Constable et. al. 2010)
  • These three make mention of data citation, mostly in reference to increased citation rates of papers(MOORE et. al. 2010),(Whitlock et. al. 2010),(Whitlock, 2011)
  • Mark Parson’s talk: https://ands.org.au/guides/data-citation-awareness.html
  • Heather’s excellent summary of resources on data citation principles

References