Data producers deserve citation credit

Posted Tue, 29/09/2009 - 14:26 by Adam Webb

Editorial in Nature Genetics, suggesting the use DOIs for datasets.

..data still remain someone's life work to be bartered in an economy of knowledge production. The value of research publications is currently acknowledged by citation. If this practice of citation is extended to datasets, these datasets and their producers will be properly recognized. 

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by Gudmundur A Thorisson - 29 Sep 2009 - 22:17

Lively discussion about this one over on FriendFeed (http://ff.im/8UPxN), including interesting suggestions on using Nature Precedings (http://precedings.nature.com) as a platform to 'dump data' to publish, and get a citable DOI in return:

"NP has the standard Web2.0 tools - tags, voting, commenting, etc. We've used it for very small data sets - like malaria assays (http://precedings.nature.com/documents/2216/version/1). I think the DOI and the fact that the citation has a formal author list makes it attractive to the traditional science community. For example, I've found my NP entries cited in articles when a better reference might have been our wiki - because the citation format is recognizable. - Jean-Claude Bradley (http://friendfeed.com/jcbradley)"

by Gudmundur A Thorisson - 29 Sep 2009 - 22:26

In terms of technical implementation of what NG editors suggest, GenBank and other primary bio-data archives could join the recently-established DataCite consortium (http://www.datacite.org) and register DOIs for their contents. More background in this paper in Data Science Journal:

Brase and Schindler. The publication of scientific data by World Data Centers and the National Library of Science and Technology in Germany. Data Science Journal (2006) vol. 5 pp. 205-208 http://dx.doi.org/10.2481/dsj.5.205

by Jean-Claude Bradley - 30 Sep 2009 - 16:31

Thanks for using our NP example! I would like to use services like datacite but isn't just limited to specific data sources?

by Gudmundur A Thorisson - 4 Oct 2009 - 20:38

@JC - the TIB DOI registration agency has handled data only from several primary data archives in the environmental sciences (see figure on http://www.std-doi.de), so yes it's limited. This recently-created DataCite consortium aims to expand the TIB model into other research domains, but this stuff moves slowly and it'll take some years I'd think.
[further comments on FF: http://ff.im/8UPxN]

by Juha Muilu - 17 Nov 2009 - 12:15

There is a intriguing analogy to open currency discussions. Pls have a look e.g. http://blog.newcurrencyfrontiers.com/2009/07/open-currency-now.html and http://MetaCurrency.org/. Citation is sort of currency right ? And same principles of markert forces may apply. For example free citing leads to high inflation
since "citing resources" are not limited, you can cite or vote as many times you like