Wednesday 26 November 2014

Datacite and DOI Names for Research Data

A recent paper by Janna Neumann and Jan Brase: Neumann J, Brase J. Datacite and DOI Names for Research Data. Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design. 2014 2014/10/01;28(10):1035-1041. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10822-014-9776-5

Tuesday 18 November 2014

To Share or not to Share? That is the (Research Data) Question

While not specifically about data citation, this post on The Scholarly Kitchen presenting results of a survey undertaken by Wiley on how and why researchers share data is likely to be of interest to this community. I'll look forward to seeing the report ...

Tuesday 14 October 2014

Data citation article in special OA issue of Learned Publishing

Callaghan S. Preserving the Integrity of the Scientific Record: Data Citation and Linking. Learned Publishing. 2014;27(5):15-24.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2014/00000027/00000005/art00004http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20140504

The topic of this special issue of Learned Publishing is data publishing, and all content of the issue is open access; included are an article on the Research Data Alliance by Andrew Treloar, one on altmetrics, and one on libraries and librarians in data management (there are others, as well).
Table of Contents: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2014/00000027/00000005

Wednesday 3 September 2014

Data citation webinar - Sept 24

This webinar will be run from the USA, but will be recorded .... no need to get out of bed at 2.00am!

Data citation and data sharing have entered what might be called the "next phase" in scholarly communication. Funders expect and even require these behaviors. Publishers are increasingly providing support for data citation, data references, and data sharing. Is all the work done? Data curators, librarians, and other information professionals continue to face many questions from researchers: When do I get a DOI? Why should I share my research data? Will you do this for me? Join Joan Starr, EZID Service Manager, Matt Mayernik, Research Data Services Specialist with NCAR, and Mary Linn Bergstrom, Data Services Librarian at UC San Diego, for conversations about these and other issues. We hope you come ready to get involved in the discussion.
 
Who should attend:
Data curators, librarians, and other information professionals working with researchers.
 
Meeting Details:
Title: Conversations about Data Citation
Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2014
Time: 10:00 AM PDT
Duration: 1 hour
Host: Joan Starr, EZID Service Manager

Note: The session will be recorded for those who cannot attend and will be available on EZID's Outreach page (ezid.cdlib.org/home/outreach).

Wednesday 23 July 2014

DOIs for data and software

Exciting to see DOIs and citations for related software and data in this recently released paper by Alex Whan (CSIRO) et al in "Plant Methods".   Scroll down the reference list to entries 32 & 33 to see data citation in action.

http://www.plantmethods.com/content/10/1/23

Interesting that the publisher has chosen an alternative to the citation format recommended by DataCite, but the presence of a  DOI will help with tracking reuse and citation metrics.

Wednesday 25 June 2014


Infographic: Understanding Metadata

If you've ever struggled with the concept of metadata this quick reference guide is your new go to! This graphic provides a simple and high-level overview of how you can use metadata to improve your research data.
http://www.ersa.edu.au/enewsjune2014/understanding-metadata
Download a copy of the Understanding Metadata infographic (JPG 355KB)



Sunday 15 June 2014

Altmetric launches Altmetric for Institutions

 ... a web-based software application that enables higher educational institutions to track and evaluate the online dissemination and impact of their authored research. Altmetric collates mentions of scholarly articles across traditional and social media, blog posts, reference management tools and post-publication peer review sites.
http://www.digital-science.com/blog/posts/altmetric-launches-altmetric-for-institutions

Thursday 29 May 2014

Research Trends Special Issue on altmetrics

From the editorial:

"This special issue of Research Trends is dedicated to altmetrics, or, as some may prefer, alternative metrics. The growing interest in the development of alternative measurements of scientific productivity resulted in the 2010 Altmetrics manifesto in which the term “altmetrics” was introduced... We believe the contributions in this Special Issue cover the major trends in the development of new metrics, and are written by leading researchers in the field."

Scientific Data launches its first batch of "data descriptors"

Scientific Data, the latest offering from the Nature Publishing Group, was launched earlier this week: http://www.nature.com/sdata/. I'm particularly pleased to see the dedicated Data Citations section; of course, there are multiple ways to present data citations (within References, within Acknowledgements), but this method brings visibility to this practice.
The featured dataset is coordinated by Australian researchers (Uni of Tasmania, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies.

Wednesday 21 May 2014

Sunday 18 May 2014

New video shows how to cite data from UK Data Service


Data are a vital part of the scientific research process. By properly citing data in research publications, it not only acknowledges sources, it also makes it easier for others to find and use the data. Citation is also expected practice for those who receive funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and becoming best practice across the social sciences.
Now a new video tutorial shows data users how to retrieve citation information directly from UK Data Service resources. This step-by-step guide covers all data available through the Discover data catalogue, including UK Census data (whether downloaded or used online) and data from international databanks such as the World Bank or International Monetary Fund.
The video tutorial complements our website guidance on Citing data and the ESRC brochure Data Citation: What you need to know. All are available at the links below.

Global-level data sets may be more highly cited than most journal articles.

 Chris Belter measured the impact of a few openly accessible data sets and compared to journal articles in his field. His results provide hard evidence that the production, archival, and sharing of data may actually be a more effective way to contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Blog 

Thursday 15 May 2014

Supporting Scientific Discovery through Norms and Practices for Software and Data Citation and Attribution

Dear Colleague Letter - Supporting Scientific Discovery through Norms and Practices for Software and Data Citation and Attribution
This is interesting - NSF fundining research into data citation and impact metrics. This is a particularly interesting angle that they suggest research into:

"
  • Citation patterns that include a role for citations (e.g. to value activities such as “data provider/curator” and/or “software tool provider” alongside “data analyzer” or “computational modeler”), which can help create a credit market for data and software sharing "
 Thanks Natasha Simons for passing this on.

Peer review of datasets

Mayernik MS, Callaghan S, Leigh R, Tedds J, Worley S. 2014. Peer Review of Datasets: When, Why, and How. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00083.1

This one from the Data Publication JISCmail list

Wednesday 14 May 2014

More on the data citation joint declaration principles

 
Thanks to Natasha for sharing this recent presentation by Joan Starr on the data citation joint declaration principles.  Well worth a look.


http://www.slideshare.net/joanstarr/data-citation-a-joint-declaration-of-principles

DOIs for GitHub repositories

https://github.com/blog/1840-improving-github-for-science

Citable code for academic software

"Sharing your work is good, but collaborating while also getting required academic credit is even better. Over the past couple of months we've been working with the Mozilla Science Lab and data archivers, Figshare and Zenodo, to make it possible to get a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for any GitHub repository."

Sunday 11 May 2014

Data Citation post on Data Pub

Data Citation post on California Digital Library's Data Pub blog

Hat tip to Sue Cook for this one:  a great resource on data citation basics with references and inclusion of dynamic data citation and "deep" citation (citing part of a dataset)


Tuesday 6 May 2014

Data publication consensus and controversies

From JISC's DATA PUBLICATION email list, this article, complete with available referees comments:
Kratz J and Strasser C (2014) Data publication consensus and controversies [v1; ref status: approved with reservations 1, http://f1000r.es/3ag] F1000Research 2014, 3:94 (doi: 10.12688/f1000research.4264
http://f1000research.com/articles/3-94/v1#article-reports

This provides excellent coverage of the current state of data publication; and yay! data citation is fairly advanced, with consensus

Tuesday 15 April 2014

Nature News: Funders punish open-access dodgers

For years, two of the world’s largest research funders — the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom — have issued a steady stream of incentives to coax academics to abide by their open-access policies.
Now they are done with just dangling carrots. Both institutions are bringing out the sticks: cautiously and discreetly cracking down on researchers who do not make their papers publicly available.

http://www.nature.com/news/funders-punish-open-access-dodgers-1.15007

Will data be next?

Thursday 27 March 2014

Citation analysis of oceanographic data sets (and its in PLoS ONE, so it's OA!)

BELTER, C. W. 2014. Measuring the Value of Research Data: A Citation Analysis of Oceanographic Data Sets. PLoS ONE, 9, e92590.
dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0092590 


Related tweet: https://twitter.com/Impactstory/status/449281205276405760

Thanks to Sue Cook for this one!

Sunday 23 March 2014

Scalable data citation in dynamic, large databases

Proll, S. & Rauber, A. 2013. Scalable data citation in dynamic, large databases: Model and reference implementation. In:  2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 6-9 Oct. 2013. 307-312.  10.1109/BigData.2013.6691588 

This makes for interesting reading, and poses one solution for citing data in dynamic databases.

 

Nature's Scientific Data Journal - first look

 
 
Scientific Data is the new data journal being published by the Nature Publishing Group.
 
 
The journals aims "to meet demands from science researchers and funders for innovative ways to make scientific data more available, citable, discoverable, interpretable, reusable and reproducible"
 
While Scientific Data is scheduled for formal release in May 2014, a couple of "pre-release" data statements (articles) have recently been published giving a flavour of what's to come.
 
Interestingly, the reference lists include a separate section for Data Citations (see below for an example).  A list of recommended data repositories is provided.
 
Worth a look ... we anticipate data journals will be increasingly important as a mechanism for publishing data.  Amongst other things, they will offer greater opportunity for data citation metrics.
 
Data Citations
  1. 1. Perkins, A. D., Lee, M. & Tanentzapf, G. GenomeRNAi GR00238-S (2014).
  2. 2. Perkins, A. D., Lee, M. & Tanentzapf, G. Figshare http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.806269 (2014).

Tuesday 18 March 2014

Data Citers Catch Up - Thursday April 3 @ 12.30 AEDST


NO NEED TO REGISTER: Just come in at 12.30pm (AEDST) using this link:
https://www4.go​tomeeting.com/j​oin/176321199

Focus for the April meet up:

Research Data Alliance Data Citation Working Group
https://rd-alli​ance.org/workin​ggroup-list.htm​l

Cite My Data DOI minting service - exploring new options for minting DOIs.
http://ands.org.au/services/cite-my-data.html

Our chair this month is Amanda Steen from Geoscience Australia.

Draft agenda
--  Welcome and introductions

--  Research Data Alliance Data Citation Working Group
Amir Aryani, ANDS representative on the Data Citation Working Group, will provide insights into the activities of the Group. Fresh from his return from the 3rd Plenary for the Alliance in Dublin during March, Amir will give a brief presentation and stay on to answer your questions. 

-- Cite My Data DOI minting service
Joel Benn from ANDS will join us to hear your thoughts about some new service options ANDS is considering for the Cite My Data Service. Do you have records already in RDA that you'd like to assign DOIs to? Anyone interested in a service where ANDS would mint DOIs for your new RDA records? If so, please come along, hear more, provide input and perhaps express interest.
 
--  Open floor for your data citation questions, issues, updates.
 
--  Call for topics and speakers for future catch ups.

Connect with your data citer's community on the blog at: http://datacite​rs.blogspot.com​.au

Tuesday 4 March 2014

Interesting article: 10 Simple Rules for the Care and Feeding of Scientific Data

Data citation rates several mentions in this article.  Worth a read.

10 Simple Rules for the Care and Feeding of Scientific Data
This article offers a short guide to the steps scientists can take to ensure that their data and associated analyses continue to be of value and to be recognized. In just the past few years, hundreds of scholarly papers and reports have been written on questions of data sharing, data provenance, research reproducibility, licensing, attribution, privacy, and more, but our goal here is not to review that literature. Instead, we present a short guide intended for researchers who want to know why it is important to "care for and feed" data, with some practical advice on how to do that.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.2134

Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles

Recently announced!  Completion of the “Joint Declaration of
Data Citation Principles”.  The Principles cover purpose, function and attributes of citations. They are reproduced briefly below.  More at: www.force11.org/datacitation


  1. Importance

    Data should be considered legitimate, citable products of research. Data citations should be accorded the same importance in the scholarly record as citations of other research objects, such as publications[1].
  2. Credit and Attribution

    Data citations should facilitate giving scholarly credit and normative and legal attribution to all contributors to the data, recognizing that a single style or mechanism of attribution may not be applicable to all data[2].
  3. Evidence

    In scholarly literature, whenever and wherever a claim relies upon data, the corresponding data should be cited[3].
  4. Unique Identification

    A data citation should include a persistent method for identification that is machine actionable, globally unique, and widely used by a community[4].
  5. Access

    Data citations should facilitate access to the data themselves and to such associated metadata, documentation, code, and other materials, as are necessary for both humans and machines to make informed use of the referenced data[5].
  6. Persistence

    Unique identifiers, and metadata describing the data, and its disposition, should persist --  even beyond the lifespan of the data they describe[6].
  7. Specificity and Verifiability 

    Data citations should facilitate identification of, access to, and verfication of the specific data that support a claim.  Citations or citation metadata should include information about provenance and fixity sufficient to facilitate verfiying that the specific timeslice, version and/or granular portion of data retrieved subsequently is the same as was originally cited[7].
  8. Interoperability and flexibility

    Data citation methods should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the variant practices among communities, but should not differ so much that they compromise interoperability of data citation practices across communities[8].
 

Monday 24 February 2014

Our next virtual Data Citers Catch Up is on Thursday March 6


  • Anne Stevenson (CSIRO) is our chair
  • Amanda Steen (Geoscience Australia) is our focus speaker: Data citation at Geoscience Australia - the journey so far.
  • Gerry Ryder (ANDS) Recent data citation questions posed to ANDS.
  • Everyone is welcome to ask, share, suggest, network....
And don’t forget to contribute to our blog: http://dataciters.blogspot.com.au

Note: there are only 25 connections for this catchup so if there are several people from your institution who want to come along, please book a meeting room and join in together.

If this is your first time using GoToMeeting you might have to download an app – it only takes a couple of minutes.  Headphones are best but not essential.

Thursday 20 February 2014

ANDS Data Citation Workshops - Adelaide and Perth

Are you based in Adelaide or Perth?  Yes?  Then, please come along to our Data Citation workshop in March to hear speakers  and join discussions in person.   Ask questions.  Help to answer questions.  Enjoy cake and coffee as you network with  colleagues!  Check out the ANDS Events Calendar for more information and registration details. 

Sunday 9 February 2014

Reference manager tools: how well do their support data citations?


Did you miss the last data citers catch-up? If so, we missed you! But here I shall attempt to bring you up to date by summarising what was discussed using this rather neat ‘community blog’. The idea behind the blog is to enable members of the data citers community to contribute a blog post whenever they feel the need – it’s a great idea that I hope it will contribute to a rich discussion around data citation.

If you have never been to a data citers catch-up, you might be wondering what they are like. Imagine a bunch of people from different Australian research institutions who are involved in managing research data and/or building institutional systems to support data management. ANDS set the date and facilitate a virtual catch-up using their gotomeeting software. Usually there is a presentation or two but it also an open forum where people new to data citation can find out more and ask questions from people who will (hopefully) be able to answer them. The questions could be related to anything data citation related – from DOIs to citation element construction to cultural change. The last citers catch-up was a little small, probably because some were attending VALA2014. Here is the gist of our discussion:

If we want researchers to cite data that they use in their research in the same way as they cite publications - leaving aside the argument that data should not be treated in the same way as publications because that’s a whole other topic - then we need to make it part of their research workflows. Reference manager tools assist researchers by proving a means to easily capture and collate citation information for publications (and record links through to those publications). But how do these tools treat datasets? Turns out, most if them don’t or don’t do it particularly well.

Dom Hogan, CSIRO, bedazzled us with a presentation on the heady and (overly?) complex world of reference manager tools and the challenge of type=dataset. Anne Stevenson, also from CSIRO, made an excellent point that the main benefit of incorporating type=dataset into reference manager tools is so that researchers can easily distinguish datasets from publications. I concluded from the presentation that the best reference manager tool to use is Endnote because it does include support for type=dataset. However, to get it work you need to have all of the Endnote patches and updates installed (and it seemed like even then you may have to do some extra steps). 

I think a follow-up to Dom’s presentation would be to create a comparison document for reference manager tools on the basis of their ability to distinguish datasets and capture a data citation. The document could include notes where deemed useful. I also suggest that we (perhaps ANDS on behalf of us) have some direct contact with reference manager tool developers/companies to follow up on whether type=dataset is on their product roadmap and suggest why it should be. I wonder if there is any such document already out there – might be worth checking with our colleagues in UK, Europe and USA. Of course there is a related issue of the need to incorporate data citation guidelines into citation style guides, but this is again a topic for another time.

Problems with reference manager tools aside; plenty of researchers still simply copy and paste a citation from a webpage into a word document [heaves audible *sigh*]. We therefore need to have support for both reference manager tools and display of the citation itself into our institutional data repositories and systems.

Hope to see you at the next data citers catch-up. Check ANDS events for details.

Thursday 16 January 2014

First Data Citers Catchup: Thurs, 6 Feb, 12.30-1.25AEDT, Virtual

Come along and catch up with others interested in making sure your institution's data is attributed and cited.

No need to register: just bookmark this url and come in via your browser  a few minutes before 12.30pm AEDT on Thurs, 6 Feb:   https://www4.gotomeeting.com/join/176321199 

Who's sharing with us on 6 Feb?  Focus: bibliographic software and data citation
  • Dave Connell (Aust'n Antarctic Div) is our chair
  • Anne Stevenson (CSIRO) will be talking about how she is hoping to use this blog
  • Dom Hogan (CSIRO) is our focus speaker: an update on how well (or badly) various bibliographic software packages can manage data citations
  • Everyone welcome to ask, share, suggest, network....
 Note: there are only 25 connections for this catchup: if there are several people from your institution who want to come along, please book at meeting room and all join in together.

If it is your first time using GoToMeeting you might have to download an app - only takes a couple of minutes.  Headphones are best but not essential.

Wednesday 15 January 2014

How do I contribute to this blog?

You want to contribute?

Fantastic - the more the merrier as we work together to build a resource that is useful for all.

You can contribute in 3 ways:

  1. Spread the word - tell others about this blog. Tweet it, post about it on your own site, email interesting posts to your friends and colleagues.
  2. Comment - if you think of something while reading a post tell others by posting a comment
  3. Write a post - is your idea or information too big for a comment then how about writing a stand alone post? 
Step by step instructions on how to do 2 & 3 can be found here.

We look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Monday 13 January 2014

Hi! Let's cite ...

Anne Stevenson here, a member of CSIRO's Research Data Support team, and new blogger to the new Data Citers blog in a new year (tip: having a Google account is useful necessary for posting; if you don't have one and don't want one, you can post a comment). I have alerts set up in a few different tools to notify me about data citation publications; I'm a happy-to-share librarian, and this blog provides a great way to do that, so you'll likely hear from me from time to time, as I share what I find.

I'll kick off with this recent paper by three members of our Australian data managing/sharing/publishing/citing community: all hail Natasha, Karen and Sam for sharing their knowledge and experience.

N. Simons, K. Visser and S. Searle. Growing Institutional Support for Data Citation: Results of a Partnership between Griffith University and the Australian National Data Service. D-Lib Magazine. 2013;19(11/12).
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november13/simons/11simons.html