Bringing Citations and Usage Metrics Together to Make Data Count

• Published in: Data science journal Vol. 18; no. 1
• Main Authors: Cousijn, Helena, Feeney, Patricia, Lowenberg, Daniella, Presani, Eleonora, Simons, Natasha
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ubiquity Press Ltd 01.03.2019; Ubiquity Press
• Subjects: data citation; data metrics; Displays (Marketing); Employee motivation; Information management; Infrastructure (Economics); Methods; research data; Research Data Alliance; Scholix; United States
• ISSN: 1683-1470; 1683-1470
• DOI: 10.5334/dsj-2019-009

Over the last years, many organizations have been working on infrastructure to facilitate sharing and reuse of research data. This means that researchers now have ways of making their data available, but not necessarily incentives to do so. Several Research Data Alliance (RDA) working groups have been working on ways to start measuring activities around research data to provide input for new Data Level Metrics (DLMs). These DLMs are a critical step towards providing researchers with credit for their work. In this paper, we describe the outcomes of the work of the Scholarly Link Exchange (Scholix) working group and the Data Usage Metrics working group. The Scholix working group developed a framework that allows organizations to expose and discover links between articles and datasets, thereby providing an indication of data citations. The Data Usage Metrics group works on a standard for the measurement and display of Data Usage Metrics. Here we explain how publishers and data repositories can contribute to and benefit from these initiatives. Together, these contributions feed into several hubs that enable data repositories to start displaying DLMs. Once these DLMs are available, researchers are in a better position to make their data count and be rewarded for their work.