Data Citation in Astronomy

Many astronomical observatories maintain bibliographies to both document the impact of their work and help justify their continued funding. [1,2]  These efforts can be labor intensive as significant human effort is required to discover and curate the links between the scientific papers and the data that was used as evidence.

These efforts do not scale well, and require focusing on only a subset of scientific journals. 

To better deal with the issues of tracking cross-discipline data usage, many groups came up with guidelines and principles for data citation. [3,4]

Recently, the research community came together to create a single set of principles for data citation that could be endorsed by all groups.[5] We believe that implementation of these principles can help to improve the scientific ecosystem by giving proper attribution to all contributors to data, improving transparency and reproducability, and making data more easily reusable to both astronomers and other researchers.

References

[1] Accomazzi, Hennekin, Erdmann & Rots, 2012. “Telescope bibliographies: an essential component of archival data management and operations”. 
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012SPIE.8448E..0KA

[2] Bishop, Grothkopf & Lagerstrom, 2012.  “Best Practices for Creating an Observatory or Telescope Bibliography”.  http://iau-commission5.wikispaces.com/file/view/Best+Practices+Final.pdf

[3] National Research Council, 2012. “For Attribution--Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards”.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13564

[4] CODATA, 2013. “Out of Cite, Out of Mind: The Current State of Practice, Policy, and Technology for the Citation of Data”.      
http://dx.doi.org/10.2481/dsj.OSOM13-043