Infrastructure, Impact and Outreach

Griffith University’s Approach to Data Citation The 2012-13 Data Citation Infrastructure Establishment Program aimed to enhance infrastructure for data citation, test methodologies for tracking impact, and provide targeted advice for researchers about benefits.

INFRASTRUCTURE Griffith’s existing infrastructure included a data repository, a metadata store (the award-winning Griffith Research Hub), feeds to Research Data Australia and prototype scripts for minting Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) via the ANDS Cite My Data service. This project refined the DOI minting scripts and developed a draft policy framework for managing DOIs. Roadmaps for content repositories and discovery services now include citation-related enhancements that will help depositors, end users and external search engines to better cite data.

IMPACT The project explored traditional and emerging ways of measuring impact; while tools and methods for data metrics are still immature this is a promising area for the future. We trialled Thomson Reuters’ Data Citation Index (DCI) and will reevaluate this regularly, along with tools from other providers. Over time, metadata quality, discipline coverage, and the number of Australian repositories should improve. The project also evaluated the altmetrics tool ImpactStory. As our data collections were newly deposited, no re-use results were available yet but it was useful to test the process to develop a report based on a set of data collection DOIs.

OUTREACH The project team spoke with subject librarians and consulted a small number of researchers, to determine how best to communicate about data citation.

Conclusions Fostering a culture of data citation will be a long-term process. Infrastructure and methods of measuring impact are evolving rapidly and can be adopted within a single institution, but changes in citation practices require further cooperation across all parts of the scholarly publishing ecosystem.

This was an important part of the project but also the most challenging. We found that citation practices vary across disciplines; DOIs are not universally understood. The evidence base for the benefits of data citation is still small and rewards systems are not yet geared to datasets. We concluded that a holistic approach is needed, that treats re-use and citation as part of good research data management.

Contact Project Outputs Blog: http://data-citation-griffith.blogspot.com.au/ Webinar: http://goo.gl/usWk2L Forthcoming article in D-Lib: http://www.dlib.org/

Sam Searle, [email protected] Natasha Simons, [email protected] Stacey Lee, [email protected] Karen Visser, [email protected]

This project is supported by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Program and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License.

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