Making Data Count: Bringing Citations and Usage Metrics Together

A journal paper, co-authored by Natasha Simons, Associate Director Skilled Workforce, the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), on ways to collect and share data usage statistics and measure data use/re-use, was recently published by the Data Science Journal.

Although researchers now have ways of making their data available, thanks to the extensive work on establishing infrastructure to facilitate sharing and reuse of research data, the paper delves into how there are no incentives to necessarily do so.

The ARDC has been working with the international community to develop shared infrastructure that facilitates sharing and reuse of research data. As part of this effort, the ARDC has played a key role in the Research Data Alliance Scholarly Link Exchange (Scholix) initiative that allows organisations to expose and discover links between articles and datasets. The exposure of these links facilitates data discovery so that someone who reads a journal article can follow the link to the underlying dataset and vice versa.

The ARDC plans to continue contributing to this key area and supports the Make Data Count project which incentivises data sharing by collecting data usage and citation metrics.

View the full paper and access the ARDC dedicated citation resources.