Offers proper recognition to authors as well as permanent identification through the use of global persistent identifiers in place of URLs which can change frequently. Use of universal numerical fingerprints (UNFs) guarantees to the scholarly community that future researchers will be able to verify that data retrieved is identical to that used in a publication decades earlier, even if it has changed storage media, operating systems, hardware, and statistical program format. Data citation is provided in a similar way that researchers routinely include bibliographic references to traditionally published resources. Data citation should include the following elements: (a) Name Principal Investigator/Author/Data Creator; (c) Release Date/Year of Publication – year of release, for a completed dataset; (d) Title of Data Source – formal title of the dataset; (e) Version/Edition Number – the version of the dataset used in the study; (f) Format of the Data – physical format of the data; (g) 3rd Party Data Producer – refers to data accessed from a 3rd party repository; (h) Archive and/or Distributor – the location that holds the dataset; (i) Locator or Identifier – includes Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), Handles, Archival Resource Key (ARK), etc.; (j) Access Date and Time – when data is accessed online; (k) Subset of Data Used – description based on organization of the larger dataset; (l) Editor or Contributor – reference to a person who compiled data, or performed value-added functions; (m) Publication Place – city, state, and country of the distributor of the data; and, (n) Data within a Larger Work – refers to the use of data in a compilation or a data supplement (such as published in a peer-reviewed paper).
