New global standards for biomedical data citation

The Identifiers.org team at EMBL-EBI has collaborated with the N2T.net team at the University of California to develop a global approach for the formal citation of research data. These compact identifiers, presented today in Nature Scientific Data, make it easier for researchers to reference and cite data without having to worry about unexpected changes to life science data records.

“From time to time, hyperlinks to life science data records may change, for example due to technical updates or institutional changes,” explains Sarala Wimalaratne, Identifiers.org Project Lead at EMBL-EBI. “Identifiers.org keeps track of all those changes and provides stable identification of life science data through the latest URLs used to access the data.”

EMBL-EBI and the California Digital Library (CDL) at the University of California are the only entities that issue citation prefixes used in the formal citation of research data. From now on, the two organisations will work together to support the new system of compact identifiers, which will point to database records either through EMBL-EBI or CDL.  

Nature Scientific Data is the first journal to adopt this new data citation format for all publications.

Read more about how compact identifiers work and how they can help you in your research on the ELIXIR website.