NCAR Data Citation Initiative: Progress and Development

As digital research data collections grow in size and usage, the desire to understand the ways that data are used to produce new scholarly products also grows. In parallel, digital technologies for identifying and linking to resources on the internet promise to make connections between scholarly publications and their underlying data more transparent and traceable. "Data citations," as the term suggests, are formal citations included in reference lists of published articles to data resources that led to a given research result. On the surface, the interest in data citations emerges out of a simple idea, namely, that data users should formally acknowledge their data sources. Upon investigation, however, data citation initiatives reveal many complications, bringing up issues of data identity, data and metadata standardization, accountability for data work, and long-term sustainability of data archives.

This presentation will outline an ongoing data citation initiative within the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The initiative, a collaboration between the NCAR library and a number of NCAR data archiving teams, is focused on developing a coherent data citation framework that encompasses the broad range of NCAR data. We will discuss our progress on 1) building internal knowledge and capacity, 2) assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to data sets and other research products, and 3) raising visibility for data issues within our organization. We will also discuss data citation developments at national and international levels, and how our local efforts both leverage and contribute to those wider activities.