In the spotlight - Data citation is about to get easier

Article dated: 21 September 2011

Good news for researchers who want an easier and more permanent way to cite ESDS data. A long-term data citation initiative is launching today, developed in association with DataCite and the British Library. And the citation tool for those who use ESDS international data has been fully integrated into its Beyond 20/20 data delivery software.

Persistent identifier project for the ESDS catalogue

Today ESDS is launching a small pilot as part of a larger strategy designed to ensure that descriptions of all revisions to ESDS data remain visible and accessible – while retaining the researchers’ link to the exact instance of the data they originally cited.

It will do this by generating a separate 'jump' page providing the full history of the study or dataset and every Digital Object Identifier (DOI) associated with it. In this way, the DOI will remain persistent over time, greatly facilitating data citation and improving the visibility of associated research. The jump page provides a DOI link to the most recent version or edition of the data and advises users how to access previous versions of the data. The jump page will be fully integrated into the data catalogue in 2012 during the planned redevelopment of the ESDS website.

Learn more about the persistent identifier project

Data citation for international data

Starting today, those who use data from the ESDS International collection will have access to a data citation tool which is fully integrated into the data delivery software Beyond 20/20. This coincides with a performance enhancing upgrade from version 8.0 to 8.2 of the software application.

Here's how it works: Each time data is downloaded from Beyond 20/20, bibliographic citation information (including an edition specific DOI) will be included in the download file. So for example, if a user chooses to download a selection of data from the September 2011 edition of the IMF Direction of Trade Statistics, the following text will appear at the top of the download file:

• International Monetary Fund (2011): Direction of Trade Statistics (Edition: September 2011). ESDS International, University of Manchester. DOI: 10.5257/imf/dots/2011-09.

This information can then be copied and pasted into the references section of any research paper in which the author has used this data. When a user then clicks on the DOI for this particular dataset they would be taken to a jump page as described above.

Read the news release