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17- Data Citation Mechanism and Service for Scientific Data: Defining a
Framework for Biodiversity Data Publishers
Vishwas Chavan1
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
I am going to focus on how we are working to resolve the issue of data citation for biodiversity
data at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), located in Copenhagen, Denmark.
For those who have not heard about GBIF, it is a multilateral intergovernmental initiative
established in 2001 with 52 countries as members and 47 international organizations. GBIF's
main objective is to facilitate free and open access to biodiversity data. Our data is available
through a portal and currently, includes 312,000,000 data records about existence of lands and
animals across the globe from over 1800 data resources that has been contributed by 342 data
publishers.
Why do we think that data citation is important? We believe that data citation will encourage our
data publishers to publish more and more datasets. Therefore, it will improve data discovery. It
will also provide some kind of encouragement for data preservation. Furthermore, it will provide
incentives to those who use the data through improving the credibility of the interpretations that
are based on the data.
What is the current practice of data citation in the GBIF network? Let me explain this with an
example. A user comes to GBIF's portal and searches for the term "Panthera Tigris." She gets
696 records from 37 different datasets, which are published by 31 different publishers. The
current citation style just says "access through GBIF data portal" and lists out all the access
points of those 37 datasets. The problem with this practice is that it doesn't tell me what was the
search string unless and until I can make an explicit statement about it, how many records were
retrieved, how many data publishers contributed to the retrieved data, when search was carried
out, who are the original contributors of the data, and who plays what role in the process from
collection to publishing of the data?
So, certainly there is a need to work around these challenges. What is needed is a data citation
mechanism with a defined citation style that can provide recognition to all stakeholders involved
with their roles, such as who is the producer of the data, who is the publisher, who is the
aggregator, and who provided curation service to the data. Given the complexity of our network,
we require cascading citations, which are citations within the citations. Furthermore, we need a
data citation service whereby a publisher can go and register its citation and all documents of
metadata. Finally, we need a discovery service, which resolves to the full-text citation and links
to the underlying data.
One of the first things that we think we need is a best practices guide for how to cite data. For
that, we require two types of recommended styles. One is related to publisher supplied dataset
citation and the other is related to query based citations. The publisher supplied dataset citation
would obviously need to consider the types of publishers (e.g., an individual, a group of
1
Presentation slides are available at http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/brdi/PGA_064019.
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114 DEVELOPING DATA ATTRIBUTION AND CITATION PRACTICES AND STANDARDS
individuals, or an institution). We also need to recognize individual's role in creating the dataset.
We need also to identify when it was first released or whether it is a one-time release or
frequently updated. Also, the citation should link back to the primary URI of the dataset and then
the citation itself needs to have a persistent identifier (preferably DOI) so the entire citation
string can be resolved. Also, we need to consider the date of the first release, the latest updates,
and the number of data records that we can actually access from a particular dataset.
Table 17-1 provides a sampling of GBIF's styles for potential citation strings or styles for the
publisher supplied citations.
Complete formulation Short formulation
Style 1 Publisher (individual) with one-time release of dataset
Publisher (YEAR), ,
