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Research Data Management

Make informed choices for research data. RDM, policy, practical guidelines, software and tools at VU Amsterdam. FAIR data, archiving, storage, publication

Citation Elements

Citing data is not different from citing a publication. Make sure to check the rules of the journal to know how you should cite when writing an article for a specific academic journal. For all of the journals, however, the minimum compulsory elements in a data citation include:

  • Author(s): Name of the author (creator) of the dataset
  • Title: Name of the dataset
  • Date of publication
  • Publisher: Archive where dataset is stored
  • Persistent Identifier: Unique identifier, most common is the DOI (see section Data Publication).

Optional elements that may be included in the reference are:

  • File Type: Codebook, movie, software
  • Version: Version number of the edition
  • Creation Date
  • Date of Consultation (last)

Example of a data citation:

Stephens, William, 2020, "Resiliences to Radicalisation - QSort Data", https://doi.org/10.34894/35MTMN, DataverseNL, V1.

For more information, see the following guidelines: