Any publication, whether printed, electronic or broadcast, based wholly or in part on the data collections provided by the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) must be accompanied by the correct citation and acknowledgement information.

Details of the citation and acknowledgement that should be used are set out in the 'Study information and citation' file, available for every dataset from the online documentation table via the relevant catalogue record within the Data Catalogue.

A citation should include enough information so that the exact version of the data being cited can be located, but does not include information on the sponsor or copyright. A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is included in the citation. This ensures that even if the location of the data changes, the DOI will always link to the data that was used. Each dataset used must have a separate citation. An example of the recommended format for citations is given below:

University of Essex. Institute for Social and Economic Research and National Centre for Social Research, Understanding Society: Wave 1, 2009-2010 [computer file]. 2nd Edition. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], November 2011. SN: 6614, http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-6614-2

An acknowledgement is a general statement giving credit to the source and distributor and includes copyright information. It can be given at the start of, or within, the text, or at the end of the article before the bibliographic references/citations. The information that should be included (e.g. depositor, sponsor) can also be found in the 'Study information and citation' file.

See also Citing international data on the ESDS International web site and Citing data on the Census.ac.uk web site.

Further information about the use of DOIs is available from: DOI project news.