Recommended practice will credit all involved in making datasets freely accessible

New citation guidelines should increase incentives to make biodiversity data universally available online via the GBIF network.

The recommendations enable due recognition to be given to all those involved in the data publication chain, from the collector in the field to curators and programmers.

The new document, Recommended practices for citation of data published through the GBIF network describes a set of styles which data publishers should use to create citations when compiling metadata, or data about datasets.

It follows the recommendations of a GBIF task group, which called for consistent mechanisms for ‘deep data citation’, enabling all relevant information about a dataset to be included in a single citation.

Among the features of the new recommended citation styles are:

• all those responsible for the development of the dataset should be individually included in an extended citation;
• shorter formulations are available using a persistent identifier; and
• citations reflect the dynamic nature of many datasets by identifying when they were first published and when last updated, as well as the number of records.

In addition to the current recommendations to data publishers, the document also summarizes proposals for future ‘query-based citation’. Under this service, any user retrieving data through GBIF will be automatically assigned a recommended citation and persistent identifier including search strings and multiple datasets.

For more information please contact:
Vishwas Chavan
GBIF Secretariat
vchavan@gbif.org