Week 3 – Documentation and Data Citation

Overview

In this lesson you were introduced to the importance of documenting your research data, and why and how to cite data.

Key Concepts & Definitions

There are many reasons why you need to document your data:

  • to help you remember the details later
  • to help others understand your research, verify your findings, review your submitted publication, replicate your results, or even archive your data for access and re-use.

Research data need to be documented at various levels:

  • project level
  • file or database level
  • and variable or item level.

Some examples of data documentation are:

  • laboratory notebooks
  • methodology reports
  • questionnaires
  • and software syntax.

Laboratory notebooks, for example, play an important role in supporting claims relating to intellectual property developed by researchers, and even defending against claims of scientific fraud.

Data citation promotes the reproduction of research results, allows the impact and use of data to be tracked, and provides a structure which recognises and rewards the data creator.

Key take-away: By providing good documentation and a citation for your work, you make it easier for others to re-use your data, cite your work, and give you acknowledgement in the scholarly record. When re-using others’ data you should give it a proper citation as well.

Additional Resources

Ball, A., Duke, M. (18 October 2012). How to cite datasets and link to publications [How-to guides]. Digital Curation Centre. Last updated 20 June 2012. Retrieved from www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/cite-datasets

CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation Standards and Practices (2013). ‘Out of cite, out of mind: The current state of practice, policy, and technology for the citation of data’ in Data Science Journal. Vol. 12, p. CIDCR1-CIDCR75. Retrieved from dx.doi.org/10.2481/dsj.OSOM13-043

Data Citation Synthesis Group (2014). Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles. Martone M. (ed.) San Diego CA: FORCE11. Retrieved from www.force11.org/group/joint-declaration-data-citation-principles-final

DataCite. (2009). Why cite data? Retrieved from www.datacite.org/whycitedata

UK Data Archive. Create and manage data: documenting your data. Retrieved from http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/document

UK Data Service. Citing data. Retrieved from ukdataservice.ac.uk/use-data/citing-data.aspx