Informal data citation for data sharing and reuse is more common than formal data citation in biomedical fields

Data citation, where products of research such as data sets, software, and tissue cultures are shared and acknowledged, is becoming more common in the era of Open Science. Currently, the practice of formal data citation—where data references are included alongside bibliographic references in the reference section of a publication—is uncommon. We examine the prevalence of data citation, documenting data sharing and reuse, in a sample of full text articles from the biological/biomedical sciences, the fields with the most public data sets available documented by the Data Citation Index (DCI). We develop a method that combines automated text extraction with human assessment for revealing candidate occurrences of data sharing and reuse by using terms that are most likely to indicate their occurrence. The analysis reveals that informal data citation in the main text of articles is far more common than formal data citations in the references of articles. As a result, data sharers do not receive documented credit for their data contributions in a similar way as authors do for their research articles because informal data citations are not recorded in sources such as the DCI. Ongoing challenges for the study of data citation are also outlined.