Love Your Data Week, Day 4: Data Citation

As stated on the Love Your Data site: "Data are becoming valued scholarly products instead of a byproduct of the research process. Federal funding agencies and publishers are encouraging, and sometimes requiring, researchers to share data that have been created with public funds. The benefit to researchers is that sharing your data can increase the impact of your work, lead to new collaborations or projects, enables verification of your published results, provides credit to you as the creator, and provides great resources for education and training. Data sharing also benefits the greater scientific community, funders,the public by encouraging scientific inquiry and debate, increases transparency, reduces the cost of duplicating data, and enables informed public policy."

Looking for some pointers on how to share your data? If you're at the University of Washington, you may already be sharing papers in the ResearchWorks Archive. The Libraries is in the process of updating the archive and working out how best to support data archiving on campus, so if you have data you want to preserve in the long-term, contact us to see if we can use your data as a test case as we build a new data repository.

If you're interested in learning more about how data citation impacts research reputation, Robin Chin-Roemer has a new book called Meaningful Metrics that serves as a guide to impact, bibliometrics, altmetrics as well as a few other topics. 

For today's activity, consider these "good practice" tips:

• share your data upon publication
• share your data in an open, accessible and machine readable format
• deposit your data in your institution's repository to enable long-term preservation
• license your data so people know what they can do with it
• tell people how to cite your data 
• when choosing a repository, ask about the support for tracking its use. Is a handle or DOI provided? Can the depositor see how many views and downloads the data has? Is the cite indexed by google, google scholar, the data citation index?