Implications of data sharing on formal data citation in biomedical fields

Formal data citation recognizes data sharing sources and is itemized in the references section of published bibliographies. Current practice of formal data citing is becoming problematic because its use is not widely adopted. This study examined research data sharing in data repositories within the biomedical field. The study also explored how research data are documented and formally cited (i.e., formal references in the published bibliographies). Data were collected from major data sharing repositories commonly used in biomedical fields. Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) were found more widely used as data identifiers rather than Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) which is concerning since URLs are less stable than DOIs. The rate of data sharing in the Data Citation Index (DCI) and the rate of formal data citation in bibliographic references in the Web of Science (WoS) corresponds to the most practices in data repositories in biomedical fields. The contribution of this study is providing insight into the form and use of formal data citation in scholarly communications so that data sharers receive appropriate acknowledgment and formal scholarly credit consistently