Data Management for Researchers

Data are richly described with a plurality of accurate and relevant attributes

Your data should have plenty of documentation that describes many features of your data. 

Data are released with a clear and accessible data usage license

You should give your data a license for how people can use it when you publish it. This may range from public domain and anyone can do anything they want with it to more detail options like providing attribution and/or restricting to not-for-profit use. You can choose a Creative Commons License or, if you're sharing code or more technical work, you may want an open source license, which are designed for that purpose. 

Data are associated with detailed provenance

"Provenance" is a fancy word that refers to the origin, source, or ownership of the data. Keep records of where the data came from, who worked on it, and where it has been to meet this requirement.

Data meet domain-relevant community standards

This is similar to the information in the Interoperable section of this guide. Your discipline likely has standards related to metadata formats, language used in data files, organization within data files, software, and methods. Using those standards helps ensure that other researchers will be able to combine your data with other datasets and reuse the data in future projects.

How to Cite Data

Citing data is very much like citing anything else. You'll need to know: 

• author/creator
• date of publication
• title, including version or edition
• publisher or distributor (such as the name of the repository where the data was found)
• URL, DOI or other persistent identifier

Example Citations from IASSIST's Quick Guide to Data Citation

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: Inter-university 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

To be Reusable:

• R1. meta(data) are richly described with a plurality of accurate and relevant attributes
• R1.1. (meta)data are released with a clear and accessible data usage license
• R1.2. (meta)data are associated with detailed provenance
• R1.3. (meta)data meet domain-relevant community standards

FAIR Principles definition as referenced from: Wilkinson, M. D. et al. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci. Data 3:160018 doi: 10.1038/sdata.2016.18 (2016).