Why is Data Citation Important?
If you want to be able to put a complete citation to your own data in your journal article, you will need to arrange for a permanent location for your data before publication. Even merely establishing a DOI for the data pre-publication saves work down the road.
- Examples of Citing DataThe essential elements of a data citation along with some examples, from the DataCite organization.
Guides to Citing Data
- "Citing Data"A great guide from MIT's Social Science Data Services
Sociology
Relevant sections from the ASA Notice to Contributors, rev. February 2011.
- American Sociological Review Notice to ContibutorsSee esp. section 5 "References" under Manuscript Submission, Manuscript Preparation.
Economics
The following snippets are from the American Economic Review policy on data availability (linked below).
(accessed 8/9/2013)
- American Economic Review: Data Availability Policy"It is the policy of the American Economic Review to publish papers only if the data used in the analysis are clearly and precisely documented and are readily available to any researcher for purposes of replication. Authors of accepted papers that contain empirical work, simulations, or experimental work must provide to the Review, prior to publication, the data, programs, and other details of the computations sufficient to permit replication. "
Citation Software
EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley all have a resource type for datasets. So, when you are building your bibliography of journal articles, books, documents, web pages, etc., be sure to document your data sources, too!
