The joint principles on data citation represent a new phase of activity that focuses on principled integration with the scholarly research and publishing ecosystem and a broad consensus on data citation practices. What has emerged in the publishing and research communities is agreement that citation is needed to support attribution and verification, recognition that citations must support both human and machine clients, maturity of robust persistent identifiers, and the desire to integrate data citation in standardized ways within publications, catalogs, tool chains and larger systems of attribution. [...] Lowering the barrier to research data discovery and use, coupled with an increased ability to link data with publications, could enable new forms of scholarly publishing, promote interdisciplinary research, strengthen the linkage between policy and science and lower the costs of replicating and extending previous research. For this reason, the submission requirements for Science – one of the most cited, read and respected journals in the sciences – stipulate that “all data necessary to understand, assess and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science” and that “citations to unpublished data [emphasis added] and personal communications cannot be used to support claims in a published paper”..

The scope of the principles is solely to provide data citation recommendations, not to include detailed specifications for implementation or to focus on technologies or tools or research data repositories. The principles should extend to all disciplines and all types of data. As will be seen below, the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles reflects various efforts and presents a broad convergence on eight core principles: Importance. Data should be considered legitimate, citable products of research. Data citations should be accorded the same importance in the scholarly record as citations of other research objects, such as publications.

Credit and Attribution. Data citations should facilitate giving scholarly credit and normative and legal attribution to all contributors to the data, recognizing that a single style or mechanism of attribution may not be applicable to all data.

Evidence. In scholarly literature, whenever and wherever a claim relies upon data, the corresponding data should be cited.

Unique Identification. A data citation should include a persistent method for identification that is machine actionable, globally unique and widely used by a community.

Access. Data citations should facilitate access to the data themselves and to such associated metadata, documentation, code and other materials as are necessary for both humans and machines to make informed use of the referenced data.

Persistence. Unique identifiers, and metadata describing the data and its disposition, should persist – even beyond the lifespan of the data they describe.

Specificity and Verifiability. Data citations should facilitate identification of, access to and verification of the specific data that support a claim. Citations or citation metadata should include information about provenance and fixity sufficient to facilitate verifying that the specific time slice, version and/or granular portion of data retrieved subsequently is the same as was originally cited.

Interoperability and flexibility. Data citation methods should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the variant practices among communities but should not differ so much that they compromise interoperability of data citation practices across communities.

One only has to open a book such as Walker’s 1971 edited volume [15] documenting one of the first workshops about interactive information retrieval, Interactive Bibliographic Search: The User/Computer Interface, which contains citations to hundreds of studies, to appreciate the depth of our field and one’s place in it. Many people come to this field with the ill-formed notion that information science is somehow related to the information technology boom of the 1990s and that search interfaces and retrieval systems are contemporary inventions. Today, information science means different things to different people and does many different things for many different people. As educators, we have a responsibility to make sure students at all levels, and people more generally, understand the history of information science and importantly, the central role libraries and librarians have played in its development.

The practice of bibliographic citation to supporting materials was formalized in scholarly publishing more than a century ago. In this tradition, a "bibliographic citation" refers to a formal, structured reference to another scholarly work. In most fields, citations are made in the body of the work. Full references typically appear at the end of the main text, providing more detailed bibliographic information for each work referenced.

Interactive information retrieval