Updated Data Citation Guidelines for Earth Science Data

Already in Summer 2019, Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) published updated Data Citation Guidelines and new Software and Services Citation Guidelines for the Earth science community. Link.

The Data Citation Guidelines provide recommendations for Earth science data stewards to create a data citation that is meaningful to a human reader, and resolvable and actionable by computers. This is relevant because repositories should provide citation information for each of their data sets and make these citations available to the community through common systems like DataCite and CrossRef.

The ESIP Data Citation Guidelines have been updated to include recommendations that address the complexity modern data and ensuring precise access to it over time. Key elements include:

• Resolvable Persistent Identifiers, rather than URLs, to provide the ability to successfully access the data over decades.
• Machine Readable Citations that allow machines to access and interpret the resource.
• Micro-citations that refer to the specific data used in large datasets.
• Data and Time Access citations for dynamic data.

As a reference, a mapping of each of these concepts to several commonly used metadata standards or dialects is provided in an appendix.

These guidelines are tailored to Earth science and related data, but they are built from accepted guidance by recognized data science and research communities and international standards organizations, notably the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles.