Some of you might already be familiar with DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), especially if you have experience in writing journal papers or reports. You would typically be citing third-party works with DOIs in your reference lists.

DOIs play an important role in making research papers accessible always, easily citable and facilitate research impact tracking eg. citation counts.

Did you know that research data can have their own DOIs too?

If you would like to enjoy similar benefits for your research data, consider depositing them in the NTU research data repository DR-NTU (Data). Each dataset is automatically given a DOI. It becomes publicly discoverable only after the data depositor has clicked ‘Publish’.

Here’s an example of a published dataset with DOI (https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/KDHIN8) in DR-NTU (Data):

So, what can you do with the DOIs of your research data?

10 suggested ways:

  1. Submit year research data DOI to your journal publisher together with your journal article manuscript. More and more journal publishers are asking for underlying research data.
  2. Insert the DOI of your underlying research data into your journal article. Readers of your journal article could refer to your data if interested.
  3. Include the DOIs of your research data in your CV and/or publication list.
  4. Include the DOIs of your research data in your ResearcherID.
  5. Include the DOIs of your research data in your Google Scholar Profile.
  6. Include the DOIs of your research data in your ORCID.
  7. Tweet your research data DOIs.
  8. Share your research data DOIs with potential collaborators.
  9. Use the same title as your journal article for your dataset. Just add ‘Related data for: … (journal article title) …’ or ‘Replication data for: … (journal article title) …’ as a prefix for your dataset title. When people look for your journal article via Google, they will see both your article and research data in the Google search results.
  10. Publish the DOI of your research data as part of your research preregistration.

NTU faculty and research staff can start depositing their research data in DR-NTU (Data) as and when they’re done with the processing and analysis of their data files. Just go to DR-NTU (Data), look for your school/institute/centre sub-dataverse and click ‘Login’. Click ‘Add dataverse’ to create one based on your own name if you haven’t done so yet. Then, you can create more dataverses under your own individual dataverse or you could ‘add dataset’ directly under your individual dataverse. Students are welcome to deposit their research data too after consulting their supervisors. Contact your research data management librarian at rdm@ntu.edu.sg for more help.

 

Check out ‘Research data horror story’