Research Data: Find and cite data

Reseach data which has been deposited or opened can be found in the repositories where they have been made available. Datasets can also be found in search services which harvest information from several repositories.

• OpenAIRE: Explore - more than a million datasets, in all fields of science, of which more than 300 000 are open access datasets (harvests from FigShare, Zenodo and many more)
• Etsin - descriptions (metadata) of more than 10 000 Finnish datasets from all fields of science. Metadata from, amongst others, the Language Bank of Finland, the Finnish Social Science Data Archive and the Finnish Environmental Institute are harvested into Etsin.
• Aila - the data catalogue of the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) includes more than 1500 datasets which are openly available or can be downloaded for research purposes or studies (login required)
• Avoindata.fi - Finnish national portal for open data. Avoindata.fi is a service for publishing and utilizing open data, and contains data mainly from the public sector. The service is maintained by Digital and Population Data Services Agency.

Use search engines to explore and find datasets from various repositories and services:

• DataCiteCommons
• Google Dataset Search

Idea: Datasets which have been made openly available can be used in teaching and re-used for course assignments, theses etc.(depending on the licensing)

Publishing (meta)data is an academic merit. Remember to add information about both your publications and published datasets into Åbo Akademi University's research portal AboCRIS. Note that the dataset needs to be published in an external service before adding the information to AboCRIS. Instructions for how to add information about published datasets is available on the intranet (login required).

Read more:

DataCites - Cite your data (20.8.2019). https://datacite.org/cite-your-data.html

Finnish Social Science Data Archive - Citing archival data (13.4.2021). https://www.fsd.tuni.fi/en/data/downloading-and-using-data/citing-data/

George Mason University Library info guide (20.8.2019). https://infoguides.gmu.edu/citingdata

GitHub Guides - Making your code citable (13.5.2021). https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/

Laine, H (ed.) 2018 Tracing Data - Data Citation Roadmap for Finland. Helsinki, Finland: Finnish Committee for Research Data. URN: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe201804106446

Data availability statements provide information of where to find data supporting the results of a research article. Many journal publishers have a research data policy with template statements that you can use or adapt for your data availability statement. Journals often encourage researchers to share data in public repositories or in supplementary materials of the publication. In the statement, you can link to your data in a repository or refer to the supplementary materials published in the article. Most journals also approve of the option to state that data is available upon reasonable request due to privacy/ethical restrictions. In this case, it is usually the corresponding author who is the primary contact for data requests. Some publishers require that the authors state the reasons why the data are nor publicly available, for example restrictions due to information that could compromise the privacy of research participants or embargo due to commercial restrictions.