DATASETS IN GEOLOGY ARTICLES: A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION OF USE, CITATION, AND REPOSITORIES

Scientific progress relies on sharing results and discoveries and building on the work of others. Geology researchers are presumably increasingly interested in sharing, and required by funders to share, their datasets and are also presumably increasingly reliant on the shared datasets of other researchers. Options for sharing datasets include local institutional or organizational repositories; journal article / publisher repositories; and national / international research network repositories. An analysis of articles in selected, impactful, professional journals for Geology: Geology; Journal of Metamorphic Geology; The Journal of Geology; and Sedimentology, published between 2009 - 2013, was conducted to determine if the mention of, and specific citing of, datasets has increased over the last five years. Additionally, major repositories for Geology datasets were identified and citations to them were noted.