Bridging the Gap: Enhancing Prominence and Provenance of NASA Datasets in Research Publications

Abstract

Attribution of datasets that were used to generate research results described in peer-reviewed publications to the original source of these datasets (which are often archived at NASA Earth Science data centers) has been very challenging. Even though the data citation standard of citing datasets as research artifacts and citing them with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) was introduced over a decade ago, most authors do not properly reference the data used in their studies and merely mention them in the text. The lack of proper citations of datasets makes the peer-reviewed publication less transparent, imperils reproducibility, and impedes open science. We offer an open-source publication management methodology and a tool that can help to enhance usage-based data discovery, prominence, and provenance of the data; reproducibility of the research results; and potentially increase the return on investment on NASA-funded research.

Keywords

• open-source
• data provenance
• data usage
• data publication
• dataset citation
• dataset doi
• citation management