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Open data metrics require open infrastructure
Open data metrics rely on tools to capture data usage information and make this available to the community in transparent, traceable ways. The tools below enable collecting and exposing different measures of data usage.
Data Citation Corpus
Data citations are a useful step toward evaluation of data usage, however, the community has lacked a public and comprehensive resource to access data citations at scale. In 2023, the Wellcome Trust awarded funds to build the Data Citation Corpus to address this community need and dramatically transform the data citation landscape.
The Data Citation Corpus will provide a central aggregate of citations to research data across articles, preprints, and other outputs to help advance our understanding of the use and impact of open data. Made available as an open CC0 community resource, the corpus aims to enable different stakeholders —including funders and institutions— to evaluate the reach of open data, and complete large-scale analyses to develop evidence on practices around data usage.
The DataCite Usage Tracker
Dataset views & downloads provide a measure that researchers and other users found the dataset relevant to their work, and thus insights into data usage. The DataCite Usage Tracker allows data repositories to consistently report data views and downloads through a JavaScript tracker that collects web-based usage. The Usage Tracker automatically sends usage data to DataCite, which generates monthly usage reports for repositories.
- Simple Client-Side Implementation
- Simplified Reporting
- Privacy-Focused: Never retains identifiable information
Further documentation about the Usage Tracker is available at support.datacite.org/docs/datacite-usage-tracker.
Contact DataCite to discuss how to implement the Usage Tracker at your repositoryAdditional resources
Data citations
Further guidance on workflows for repositories and publishers to collect, store and expose data citations is available below:
| Guidance for repositories | Guidance for publishers |
Views & downloads
The COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data provides repositories with a standard to generate and normalize usage metrics for research data. DataCite supports the submission of usage reports developed per the COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data. This workflow involves repositories completing log processing for views and downloads, to then generate SUSHI reports, and submit those to DataCite.
DataCite provides documentation for processing views & downloads per the Code of Practice for Research Data, and for submitting data usage reports to DataCite.
Views and downloads can be consumed from DataCite through DataCite Event Data. Documentation is available at support.datacite.org/docs/consuming.
DataCite Commons
DataCite Commons is a public interface that allows searching for works, people, organizations and repositories via their persistent identifiers (PIDs). Datasets with DOIs are available via DataCite Commons and the records display the citations, views & downloads for each dataset.
