Citing data (without tearing your hair out) by Bonnie Swoger
From the post:
The changing nature of how and where scientists share raw data has sparked a growing need for guidelines on how to cite these increasingly available datasets.
Scientists are producing more data than ever before due to the (relative) ease of collecting and storing this data. Often, scientists are collecting more than they can analyze. Instead of allowing this un-analyzed data to die when the hard drive crashes, they are releasing the data in its raw form as a dataset. As a result, datasets are increasingly available as separate, stand-alone packages. In the past, any data available for other scientists to use would have been associated with some other kind of publication – printed as table in a journal article, included as an image in a book, etc. – and cited as such.
Now that we can find datasets “living on their own,” scientists need to be able to cite these sources.
Unfortunately, the traditional citation manuals do a poor job of helping a scientist figure out what elements to include in the reference list, either ignoring data or over-complicating things.
If you are building a topic map that relies upon data sets you didn’t create, get ready to cite data sets.
Citations, assuming they are correct, can give your users confidence in the data you present.
Bonnie does a good job providing basic rules that you should follow when citing data.
You can always do more than she suggests but you should never do any less.