iPRES 2012 Tutorial:
Introduction to Data Citation

Monica Duke of UKOLN will give a tutorial entitled Introduction to Data Citation, written by her and colleague Alex Ball, on 2 October at iPRES 2012 in Toronto. The tutorial will examine reasons and requirements for data citation, formats for data citation, and examples and guidance from different disciplines.

Background to the tutorial

Data is a valuable part of the scholarly record, and is necessary to support the validation, reproducibility and re-use of research, but currently only a small proportion of it is shared. Often this is because, at least in part, researchers do not feel their contributions would be adequately recognised by data reusers or the community in general, or do not have the know-how to link their data to other scholarly outputs. This barrier could be removed, though, if data citation were a natural and accepted part of the scholarly communication process. Moves to bring this about are gaining momentum, supported by advances in data management, improvements in data repository infrastructure, the emergence of data journals, and agreements on data citation practices.

Aims

This tutorial will provide an overview of latest developments in infrastructures, techniques, and initiatives relevant to data citation, and will present examples, issues and open questions. The tutorial will impart up-to-date information and raise awareness of current discussions. The goal is for participants to gain an understanding of data citation, why it is important, and how to support it. Participants will leave with a good grounding in all aspects of data citation, knowledge of where to find further information and a greater ability to respond to researchers' data citation needs.

The tutorial will examine reasons and requirements for data citation, formats for data citation, and examples and guidance from different disciplines. It will introduce related technologies (such as identifiers and vocabularies), and present an overview of relevant infrastructure (such as data repositories) and initiatives including recent international meetings, organisations like DataCite and ORCID, and communities like Beyond Impact. Participants will be encouraged to think about practical implementation issues and how they can support users at their own institutions and organisations. The tutorial aims to cover the basics of data citation, emerging developments such as data journals, and topical questions being addressed by the larger community.

Who would benefit?

The tutorial will be of interest to practitioners with responsibility for supporting researchers with the management of data, e.g. university librarians or other research support staff who may wish to advise on data citation; providers of digital infrastructure (including repository managers and publishers) interested in supporting data citation; and anyone seeking an introduction to data citation. A few places remain.

Level of experience for this tutorial is introductory to intermediate. The tutorial assumes some basic understanding of data management principles and scholarly communications, but starts at an introductory level for data citation.

The authors

Monica Duke has participated in several JISC-funded projects in the United Kingdom around the themes of metadata, resource discovery, infrastructure and research data management, including eBank UK and SageCite. She is currently working in the role of Institutional Support Officer for the Digital Curation Centre, supporting Higher Education Institutions in the UK with their data management planning.

Alex Ball is also a Research Officer with UKOLN, University of Bath, working in the areas of digital curation, research data management and scientific metadata. He has worked on EPSRC-, ESRC- and JISC-funded projects in the UK including the KIM Grand Challenge Project and the Data Audit Framework Development Project. He is co-chair of the Dublin Core Science and Metadata Community and an Institutional Support Officer with the Digital Curation Centre. Together, Alex and Monica have published the DCC Briefing Paper on Data Citation and Linking and the DCC guide How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications.

Further information is available from the iPRES 2012 Web site.

Update: the tutorial slides, together with links to the accompanying exercises and a supporting document describing relevant resources, are now available from the DCC Web site.