Jisc Releases Briefing Document on Data Citations

The briefing document was published online today by JISC.
From the JISC Web Site:

Commissioned paper from Cameron Neylon (Curtin University) on citation practices for research data. Includes information on current (2016) global activity in the field, parallels with traditional citation, and recommendations.

From the Document’s Executive Summary:

Interest in Data Citation is growing rapidly. This is motivated by two main interests, improving the quality of information on the relationships between data and articles, and gaining or assigning credit for data contributors. Researchers and others are most interested in formal citation as a means of showing usage and impact of data publication compared to other potential measures of usage. Much of the systems and functionality for useable data citation is in place but practice differs amongst publishers and repositories and uptake by researchers is limited.
Work on harmonising practice and systems is proceeding rapidly under the auspices of the NIH funded Data Citation Implementation Pilot, a program of FORCE11. While focussed on biomedical sciences this group is the main driver of technical implementation and best practice development currently. Progress is being made, however the current limited scale of data citation means that it will be some time before a critical mass of high quality information is available.
Citation is a complex practice and differences are inevitable as a varied practice which is being adopted from a different context (document citation) is adapted and developed for a diverse set of use cases. Realising these potential differences and identifying when conflict is arising may be a valuable contribution to making progress on the development and implementation of best practice. There may be value in considering how to connect theoretical work on the motivation behind citation with practical implementation and system design issues.

Direct to Full Text Document (9 pages; MS Word)

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