Geographic data citations: case study of DIBAVOD – systematic review
Society, mainly through state and public institutions, spends considerable funds on the acquisition, management and sharing of data acquired with public funds, including scientific data. Evaluating the success of an open data policy is very problematic. One possibility is to use the citations of these datasets to track the use of open data. Dataset citation is a relatively new field and still faces a number of methodological and technical challenges, including little awareness in the scientific community of the positives of dataset citation. Also problematic is the low level of skill in citing datasets, which generally leads to different forms and ways of citations. In this study, an analysis was performed of the citations of the geographic database DIBAVOD, which is managed by T. G. Masaryk Water Research Institute. In total, 122 citing documents were included in the study. The study showed that the forms and methods of citation vary widely and do not show any discernible trends over time. Only the number of citations shows a slightly increasing trend. Almost a quarter of the papers then only mentioned the use of DIBAVOD without indicating the source of this data or citing it in another form.
