Posts tagged with data management in Blog Bits and Pieces

In early 2021, I was trying to verify whether the DataCite Data Metrics badge, https://support.datacite.org/docs/displaying-usage-and-citations-in-your-repository a tool for displaying usage and citation information, was working or not. However, I had no easy way of knowing whether any of our researchers had actually cited any of the data sets we host in Deep Blue Data in their published articles, let alone whether other researchers had. So, I decided to begin the process of adding citations to our datasets via the DataCite API, based on information we have in our “Citations to related material” field. I was using the instructions on https://support.datacite.org/docs/contributing-data-citations#.

The following is my process and the results of that process.

In the UMich Research Data Services (RDS) group, we see and work with all sorts of data. One particularly thorny variety is netCDF. In Deep Blue Data, we have been getting regular deposits of data in this format, and we didn't know much about it. We had many questions how do we open it, what's its structure, how do researchers create these files and why can the size vary so widely from 100s of MBs to 100s of GBs or even TBs? Jake Carlson, Director of RDS, and I hashed out the idea of creating "profiles" for file formats as quick reference resources for RDS as well as others in the data curation field to help us do our jobs more easily and consistently. So, we thought we'd pilot this idea by creating a “Data Curation Format Profile” (DCFP) for netCDF data files since it seemed like an interesting file format and we were likely to get more of them in the future.