Assessing the uptake of persistent identifiers by research infrastructure users

Area of Science:

• Bibliometrics
• Scholarly Communication
• Research Infrastructure Management

Background:

• Efforts are underway to promote citations for research outputs like data sets and software.
• Policies and procedures are being developed to encourage referencing research infrastructures.
• The actual change in authors' referencing practices remains an open question.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the increasing identification and citation of research infrastructures in scholarly literature.
• To assess the adoption of persistent citable identifiers for research resources.
• To understand the trends in referencing data sets, software, and computing facilities.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of four focused case studies.
• Examination of scholarly publications for references to research infrastructures.
• Tracking the use of persistent citable identifiers.

Main Results:

• References to research infrastructures are increasing in the literature.
• The patterns of increase in citations are variable across different resource types.
• Citation practices for data sets and computing resources may evolve more slowly than for software.

Conclusions:

• While citation of research infrastructures is growing, adoption is uneven.
• Existing citation and acknowledgment habits present inertia affecting the uptake of new practices.
• Further efforts may be needed to accelerate the adoption of formal citations for all research resources.