To Cite or Note to Cite: Researchers to credit data sets in their publications and how do you track those citations?

Over the last several decades, researchers have become increasingly dependent upon satellite data to support and prove their working hypotheses in almost all divisions of the atmospheric and earth sciences. As this dependence grew, the institutions who made this data available found themselves needing to prove to funding agencies and parent institutions the value they provided to the research community.

At the National Snow and Ice Data Center, we have developed a strategy to encourage scientists to list the data set they used in their research in such a way that we can track how many times data sets, developed by and archived at NSIDC, are used in current research. This strategy includes providing citation formats on the data set's catalog page, encouraging users during customer service calls to cite the data, and searching bibliographic databases and web sites such as ISI Web of Science and Google Scholar for mention of NSIDC products.

Going forward, we are implementing other methods to encourage citations, how to correctly format citations using ESIP's Interagency Data Stewardship/Citations/provider guidelines and assigning DOIs to our data sets for better tracking.

This paper will outline the history of our processes, the current issues arising from researchers' needs for proper accountability of their own work, and how departments within the data center collaborate to make this work.