Abstract
Significant progress has been made in the past few years in the development of recommendations, policies, and procedures for creating and promoting citations to data sets, software, and other research infrastructures like computing facilities. Open questions remain, however, about the extent to which referencing practices of authors of scholarly publications are changing in ways desired by these initiatives. This paper uses four focused case studies to evaluate whether research infrastructures are being increasingly identified and referenced in the research literature via persistent citable identifiers. The findings of the case studies show that references to such resources are increasing, but that the patterns of these increases are variable. In addition, the study suggests that citation practices for data sets may change more slowly than citation practices for software and research facilities, due to the inertia of existing practices for referencing the use of data. Similarly, existing practices for acknowledging computing support may slow the adoption of formal citations for computing resources.
Highlights
Research organizations, data repositories, and universities are assigning persistent webaccessible identifiers in large numbers to scientific resources such as data sets, software packages, and research facilities
The largest number of relevant documents was found for the NCEP FNL data set, and the smallest number found for the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) data set
This paper uses four focused case studies to evaluate whether changes in the practices of researchers can be detected with regard to the citation of research infrastructural resources: data sets, software packages, and research facilities
Summary
Data repositories, and universities are assigning persistent webaccessible identifiers in large numbers to scientific resources such as data sets, software packages, and research facilities Most such efforts are utilizing identifier assignment services provided by the DataCite organization (http://datacite.org; see [1,2]), which enables individual organizations to register Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for digital and non-digital resources [3,4]. Each data citation initiative needs to make decisions about what is being identified, who should be attributed as authors or contributors, when identifiers should be assigned, and how resources and their associated identifiers will be managed and maintained over time [10] Implementation recommendations provide guidance on how to make progress, even if many issues are very context-dependent [15,16]
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