Reusing research data

Where to find reusable research data?

Search engines that can help to find data:

B2FIND

OpenAIRE Explore

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)

Research Data Australia (research data generated in Australia)

DataONE (Earth and environmental sciences data)

Isidore (humanities and social sciences data)

CESSDA Data Catalogue (social sciences data)

You can also check out various data repositories (e.g. MIDAS, Zenodo) for data published in them.

Data licensing

A licence describes the conditions under which the dataset can be reused.

Data published in repositories are usually licensed using one of the standard open licences. Users are informed about the licence by indicating the name of the licence or by using a specific icon.

One of the most commonly used standard open licence systems is the Creative Commons (CC) licence suite.

Open software is usually assigned one of the many open source software licences.

Citing datasets

The exact layout of a research data citation depends on the citation style used.

Some data repositories can automatically generate references following a chosen citation style for the datasets published in them.

Main elements to be found in a dataset citation:

• author(s);
• publication date (when the dataset was made public through the repository);
• full title (including version number, if applicable);
• publisher or distributor (in most cases, this would be the repository in which the dataset can be found);
• persistent identifier (DOI, etc.) or URL if no persistent identifier available (in this case, the webpage access date should be indicated).

An APA style example:

Melnik-Leroy, G. A. (2021). Modelling and Analyzing Consumer Behavior under Covid-19 [Data set]. National Open Access Research Data Archive (MIDAS). https://www.doi.org/10.18279/MIDAS.CogniMod.16335210.18279/MIDAS.CogniMod.163352.