Research Data Management at SUNY Geneseo

This page provides a quick look at ways to find data and ways to increase your data citation rates.

If you're looking for assistance with citing someone else's data, please visit either the Milne Library Data Collections - Data Citation page or the library's citation guide.

The open web provides a plethora of resources for finding data. Try using advanced Google searching, or check out the other recommended resources below.

Tips for searching Google include:

    •    Try using Google Advanced Search
    •   Include search terms like data or table 
    •   Google ignores the word AND as a search operator. But typing OR in all caps will find similar or related terms (e.g. women OR females OR girls).
    •   Search for a particular document type (e.g. childhood obesity filetype:xls)
    •   Search for data on a particular site or domain (e.g. childhood obesity site:.gov)
    •    Exclude words by using the "-" sign in front of the word you wish to exclude

Other places to find data

Dryad
Find and archive data files associated with any published article in the sciences or medicine.

figshare
A repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner.

Milne Library Data Collections guide
Includes a list of open data sets organized by topic, info on using data from the U.S. Census, and a list of online data repositories to search.

Increase your citation rates by allowing other researchers to cite your data as well as your publications.  There are three key steps to making your data more accessible and citeable:

1. Appraise your data to determine where in the data lifecycle it could/should be published.
2. Recommend your preferred citation format with your published data (include enough information in the citation to denote an exact version of your data). 
3. Obtain a persistent identifier for your data to make finding and citing it easier for others.

Persistent Identifier Resources

DataCite
Identify online repositories of research data, get help obtaining persistent identifiers for datasets, workflows and standards for data publication, or link underlying data to your published articles.

Open Researcher & Contributor iD (ORCiD)
Researchers can obtain a free, unique digital identifyer to distinguish their research activities from others with similar names.

You've followed all the guidelines and made your data findable and citeable, but how do you measure your research impact? Here are some tools that can help you.

Web of Science

Citation Alerts

Web of Science allows you to set up citation alerts for individual articles available through the database. This requires you to set up an account/profile in the database. To set up citation alerts for an article or dataset, find the article and click "Create Citation Alert" - you will be notified whenever the article is cited. Citation alerts expire one year after set-up, so be sure to renew them regularly.

Cited Reference Searching

From Web of Science's search page, select the "Documents" tab and click on "Cited References". Search for the author, title, and year of publication of the work you're trying to track. This will show you research that has cited your article. Keep in mind this is not a comprehensive list, but it can be a good place to start.

Journal Citation Reports

Things to Know

Journal Citation Reports can be helpful in determining where you want to publish your research, but can also let you see how many times and in which journals your research is being cited.

Please note that Journal Citation Reports are limited to journals indexed in Web of Knowledge, so not every journal is available. It also focuses on the impact of the entire journal, not a specific article.

Using Journal Citation Reports

Search for the journal your work is published in by title, ISSN/eISSN, or publisher. From the journal's profile page, select the appropriate year from the drop-down menu.  Under "Journal's Performance," you'll find several metrics the database uses to measure the Journal Impact Factor (JIF).

The box "Journal Impact Factor contributing items" contains a list of citeable items from the publication, along with the citation count for each one. Find your article to see the associated number. 

To see where your work is being cited, click on the "Citing Sources" tab. Each title expands to show a list of articles cited in that publication. From there, you can expand to see the specific articles that have cited your information.

Google Scholar

Cited Reference Searching

Either type in the name of the work you're interested in directly into the search bar, or use the hamburger menu in the top left corner to pull up advanced search to search by author.

On the results page, click the "cited by" link under the article.

This will show you a list of articles that have cited you. If the "Cited by" link doesn't appear, it means Google Scholar wasn't able to find any citations.

Citation Alerts

To receive alerts whenever someone cites your work, click the "cited by" link underneath your article, then click "Create Alert". You can also set up a profile in Google Scholar to compute citation metrics.