Studying Data Citations and Articles to Assess Current Data Use by Diverse Users

To meet the evolving needs of diverse data users and support the state-of-the-art in scientific research and applications, data centers and other data archives and repositories that serve multiple scientific disciplines need to understand how to improve services offered to their user communities. Analyzing how data have been used in research—as described in recent scientific publications—is valuable in identifying user needs as well as opportunities to expand support for current and potential data users. Such efforts are especially important for characterizing the needs of interdisciplinary research efforts, in which data from diverse disciplines and sources are accessed, integrated, and analyzed in innovative ways. As part of the quest to identify current and future needs of its interdisciplinary user community, SEDAC, the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, is studying data citations and the content of articles that recently cited SEDAC data to better understand the data challenges that interdisciplinary researchers face and the methods and approaches used to overcome these challenges. Aspects of data use being investigated include the composition of research teams (including both author disciplines and the institutions and countries represented), datasets used, types of data use, and tools used with the data, as reported in published articles in different types of journals. We report on the findings of the current study within the context of previous studies on interdisciplinary data use.