Citing data not only provides proper attribution and credit, it also demonstrates the impact of your work and establishes research data as an important contribution to the scholarly record. Proper citation of data sources has both immediate and long-term benefits to users and producers of data, including:
- increased transparency and reproducibility
- makes it easier to find datasets
- supports long-term persistence of datasets
- encourages the reuse of data for new research questions
How to cite data
Citing data is very similar to citing publications; there are many formats to use, but we suggest including the following important information:
- creator(s) or contributor(s)
- date of publication
- title of dataset
- publisher
- identifier (e.g. Handle, ARK, DOI) or URL of source
- version, when appropriate
- date accessed, when appropriate
The order of the information is not as important as having sufficient information to find the data set(s) used. Learn more and see examples and guidelines.