None of the major citation styles—Chicago, APA, and MLA—in their current editions provide explicit guidelines for citing data sets. For the one area in which they do provide explicit guidance—citing tables of data from an external source—they provide guidance that is far from ideal, many data librarians believe. These style guides recommend citing the source of the data only in a note on the table. A better way of citing data, some librarians have argued, would be to cite it along with textual sources in footnotes or bibliographies, where the data citations can easily be indexed and used by resources that take citations into account, such as Web of Science and Google Scholar. Citing the data only in a note on the table effectively hides the data citations from research tools that are limited to citations in the footnotes or bibliographies.1
Several organizations of data librarians and data users have been working to promote better standards for data citation. These include the Special Interest Group on Data Citation (SIGDC) of the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST, www.iassistdata.org) and DataCite (www.datacite.org), an international effort with members including the Digital Curation Center in the United Kingdom (www.dcc.ac.uk) and the Australian National Data Service (www.ands.org.au).
IASSIST has produced “Quick Guide to Data Citation,” a freely reproducible, Creative Commons–licensed handout that provides clear and useful advice to students who would like to cite their data effectively and responsibly while still generally conforming to a recognized citation style such as MLA or APA. The following advice is copied directly from that handout.
Excerpt from “Quick Guide to Data Citation”
Elements of Data Citation
Author: Name(s) of each individual or organizational entity responsible for the creation of the dataset.
Date of publication: Year the dataset was published or disseminated.
Title: Complete title of the dataset, including the edition or version number, if applicable.
Publisher and/or distributor: Organizational entity that makes the dataset available by archiving, producing, publishing, and/or distributing the dataset.
Electronic Location or Identifier: Web address or unique, persistent, global identifier used to locate the dataset (such as a DOI). Append the date retrieved if the title and locator are not specific to the exact instance of the data you used.
These are the minimum elements required for dataset identification and retrieval. Fewer or additional elements may be requested by author guidelines or style manuals. Be sure to include as many elements as needed to precisely identify the dataset you have used.
For Example
Arrange these elements following the order and punctuation specified by your style guide. If examples for datasets are not provided, the format for books is generally considered a generic format that can be modified for other source types.
APA (6th edition)
Smith, T.W., Marsden, P.V., & Hout, M. (2011). General social survey, 1972-2010 cumulative file (ICPSR31521-v1) [data file and codebook]. Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center [producer]. Ann Arbor, MI: Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor]. doi: 10.3886/ICPSR31521.v1
MLA (7th edition)
Smith, Tom W., Peter V. Marsden, and Michael Hout. General Social Survey, 1972-2010 Cumulative File. ICPSR31521-v1. Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center [producer]. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2011. Web. 23 Jan 2012. doi:10.3886/ICPSR31521.v1
Chicago (16th edition) (author-date)
Smith, Tom W., Peter V. Marsden, and Michael Hout. 2011. General Social Survey, 1972-2010 Cumulative File. ICPSR31521-v1. Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center. Distributed by Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. doi:10.3886/ICPSR31521.v1
“Quick Guide to Data Citation.” International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology (IASSIST), 2012. Retrieved May 16, 2014, from www.iassistdata.org/sites/default/files/quick_guide_to_data_citation_high-res_printer-ready.pdf. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licensesby/3.0/.
Note
1. Heather Piwowar, who tweets at @researchremix, is a good source to follow for updates on the issues mentioned in this paragraph.