Susan Noble, Service Manager for international data at the UK Data Service talks about the importance of citing data and presents a new feature to track citations of international data within the UKDS.Stat interface.
As data become an increasingly important element within the scholarly record there is widespread recognition of the need to easily locate original datasets in order to verify, reproduce and subsequently build upon this research. Despite efforts in this area (for example, see an early paper – We Need Publishing Standards for Datasets and china rcs data Data Tables written by Toby Green, Head of Publishing at the OECD back in 2009) standards for citing data are still not widely enough embedded in researchers’ practice and more work needs to be done to #CiteTheData.
Why #CiteTheData?
Last year the UK Data Service launched its #CiteTheData campaign, noting that “the citation of research data (and metadata) can support the understanding and promotion of research impact through the tracking of the use of data in research and on into policy and product development, influencing decisions about public and commercial spending and service provision.” It’s important that data are cited accurately and consistently because they are a vital part of the scientific research process, enabling easy reuse and verification of data, citation allows the level of usage to be monitored and the impact of data to be tracked. Citation also recognises and rewards data producers. The @UKDataService is holding a Data Citation webinar on 29th Feb 2016 explaining how to cite data from the UK Data Service collections and show how easy it is to produce citations in multiple formats. Join the webinar to find out more about citing data.