BioMed Central Blog : Citing and linking data to publications: more journals, more examples...more impact?

"Since BioMed Central introduced additional data sharing resources for authors and editors last year, there have been a number of further developments in the field that have necessitated an update to our supporting data information. Eight further journals, including Retrovirology, Cell & Bioscience, and Frontiers in Zoology have introduced the ‘Availability of supporting data’ section to either encourage or require all authors to consistently link their supporting data to their publication, or clearly indicate supporting data are included within the article and its additional files....It’s particularly pertinent to see links to PANGAEA from BMC Research Notes, having just returned from the EuroMarine workshop on Scientific Data Integration in Bremen, which focused on linking scientific data to journal publications. At the workshop session chair Dr. Michael Diepenbroek, who heads-up PANGAEA's systems development, alerted attendees, which included publishers, editors, researchers and software developers, to a new study of the impact of sharing data underlying publications. The study – an abstract presented at the American Geophysical Union 2011 meeting – reported a 35% increase in citations to articles published in the journal Paleoceanography, when supporting data were freely available. Of 1,331 articles sampled over the 18-year study period, the 171 articles with publicly-available data received nearly 20% (8,056) of the aggregate citations. Similarly, a study deposited in the ArXiv pre-print repository in November 2011 and distributed on Connotea also found citation rates in the astronomy field were higher for articles with links to supporting data...."