Data Citation

Citation Elements

Citing data is not different from citing a journal publication. Similar to citing a journal publication, it helps to give and receive credit, and show the impact of the original source.

Make sure to check the rules of the journal to know how you should cite when writing an article for a specific academic journal. For all of the journals, however, the minimum compulsory elements in a data citation include:

• Author(s): Name of the author (creator) of the dataset
• Title: Name of the dataset
• Date of publication
• Publisher: Archive where dataset is stored
• Persistent Identifier: Unique identifier, most common is the DOI (see section Persistent Identifier).

Optional elements that may be included in the reference are:

• File Type: Codebook, movie, software
• Version: Version number of the edition
• Creation Date
• Date of Consultation (last)

Example data citation

Stephens, William, 2020, “Resiliences to Radicalisation - QSort Data”, https://doi.org/10.34894/35MTMN, DataverseNL, V1.

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For more information, see the following guidelines:

• Dataverse
• DataCite
• DCC UK
• Data Citation Synthesis Group (2014). Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles. Martone M. (ed.) San Diego CA: FORCE11

Relevant is also the Citation File Format (CFF).