Data Citation in Solar Physics: 2015 Update & Recommendations

Last year's Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles has triggered much discussion about the best ways to handle citation of data across research disciplines. Many communities have gotten together to design solutions to the issues of giving proper credit and attribution, although many fields, including solar physics, have yet to implement them. Issues still exist regarding data citation as a record for scientific reproducability.

Solar physics data is particularly difficult to cite due to the nature of our collection methods and the method in which our data are used. Other than sounding rocket or balloon flights, our data collection from a given instrument spans years or decades but observing modes, cadence and field of view may vary daily. Researchers may only analyze a short time span of the data, only given observing modes, at a slower cadence, and/or only a portion of each image; this reduction should be described to ensure that the analysis is reproducible.

Many archives keep only the current, best calibrated data, making updates in place. It can be difficult to determine if the data used in a publication is the same as the currently available data.We discuss the current progress by the Research Data Alliance's Dynamic Data Citation Working Group, and tools and services that would be useful to identify when data may have been changed by an archive. As it may be some time before standards can be developed, we include a checklist for authors to improve reproducibility of their published articles.