Data Standards Article in D-Lib Magazine

D-Lib Magazine
March/April 2007
Volume 13 Number 3/4
ISSN 1082-9873

A Proposed Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Quantitative Data
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/altman/03altman.html

Micah Altman
Associate Director, Harvard-MIT Data Center and
Senior Research Scientist, Institute for Quantitative Social Science
Center for Government and International Studies
Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138
Gary King
David Florence Professor of Government, Institute for Quantitative Social Science
Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138
Abstract
An essential aspect of science is a community of scholars cooperating and competing in the pursuit of common goals. A critical component of this community is the common language of and the universal standards for scholarly citation, credit attribution, and the location and retrieval of articles and books. We propose a similar universal standard for citing quantitative data that retains the advantages of print citations, adds other components made possible by, and needed due to, the digital form and systematic nature of quantitative data sets, and is consistent with most existing subfield-specific approaches. Although the digital library field includes numerous creative ideas, we limit ourselves to only those elements that appear ready for easy practical use by scientists, journal editors, publishers, librarians, and archivists.