IITA introduces flexible data citation in CKAN
The IITA Communication Unit’s Data Management section has been working extensively to increase the visibility of IITA research outputs. DataKind, United Kingdom, took note of the achievement along with an exceptional high-quality dataset with the repository.
The new look of CKAN, with its many enhanced features.
One of the concerns of open access is that open data that is reused under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) may never receive any credit unlike most extracts taken from academic papers, which can easily be cited in a bibliography. There are online tools that can be used to generate citations depending on the standard or format a writer prefers. Apart from the online tools, several papers have been written in the past to guide writers on how to cite properly using any format. To ensure that academic and research activities are protected and promoted online, plagiarism tools are available to ensure that proper credit is given to authors.
Citation is also available for datasets. Data citation is the practice of providing a reference to data in the same way that books or journals are referenced in research publications. The practice will create a better measurement of the validity of reused data or the generated data. However, data citation will be useless if there is no digital persistent identifier attached to the data. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a major tool that ensures that data deposited in an open access repository is unique. It gives research the credibility it deserves.
Although there are different formats of data citation, it has been observed that most repositories have fixed citation unlike what is obtainable in paper citation where a writer can adopt a format. This limitation sometimes discourages data users when using it for research or academic purposes. IITA identified this gap among CGIAR research centers and enhanced its CKAN (http://data.iita.org) to allow data users to choose their preferred citation formats. The option ranges from APA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, MLA, and Vancouver. This has made IITA’s CKAN stand out among all data consumed by GARDIAN.
DataKind has expressed its readiness to support IITA to dive into datasets in CKAN and gain more insight for the development of new digital agricultural products. Visibility is increasing as more scientists have identified CKAN as the future of data archiving and institutional memory.
Definition taken from https://www.ands.org.au/working-with-data/citation-and-identifiers/data-citation and https://www.usgs.gov/products/data-and-tools/data-management/data-citation
