Deborah Wiltshire and James Scott from the UK Data Service outline why citing secondary data is so important for the research community and what the Support Team at UK Data Service Secure Lab are doing to help ensure levels of citation increase
It has long been the standard in all disciplines to cite the sources of information that we use in our research, whether that’s a book chapter, journal paper or another source.
Researchers are taught very early on in their studies of the middle east rcs data importance of correctly citing an array of different sources and of plagiarism and its consequences. Software such as TurnItIn are often employed by universities to help detect plagiarism, and key texts such as Cite Them Right set out very clearly how to cite.
However, what is often missing is clear instruction on how to cite secondary data such as those produced from social and business surveys, which has led to the very real problem of under-reporting of data in bibliographies.
So why should we cite data and why does it matter if we don’t?
We cite publications so that we can acknowledge information and ideas that are not our own and so that we can give due credit to the authors of that work. So why is secondary data different.