Crossposted from DataONE blog: https://www.dataone.org/news/new-usage-metrics
Publications have long maintained a citation standard for research papers, ensuring credit for cited work and ideas. Tracking use of data collections, however, has remained a challenge. DataONE is pleased to share our latest effort in overcoming this barrier and in demonstrating data reuse with new data usage and citation metrics.
The data usage and citation metrics available on our data search and discovery platform, https://search.dataone.org, include live counts of citations, downloads, and views for each dataset in our network of Earth and environmental repositories. These metrics are interactive and can be further explored to identify articles citing the data or, in the case of downloads and views, scaled over specific time-increments to dive into details of when the data was accessed. The implementation of these data usage and citation metrics results from our collaboration as part of the Make Data Count project and compliments metrics recently implemented in Dash. The metrics are also in compliance with the COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data.
The usage counts are acquired from views and downloads occurring directly through the DataONE interface, via activity at the individual repository or through clients, such as an R script. Additionally, researchers might cite a dataset having received it directly from a colleague. For these reasons, values for citations, downloads and views do not always covary.
We encourage you to explore these new metrics on https://search.dataone.org. Click on each metric and pull up the interactive figures to visualize downloads and views across time for each dataset, or the full lists of citation information for research papers citing each dataset. You can also check out the DataONE documentation for further details on the metrics implementation.
