MRC guidance on data management plans
The Medical Research Council (MRC) guidance on data management plans provides guidance for research applicants and for reviewers, and a template, on how to develop a data management plan for a grant application submitted to the UK Medical Research Council.
An evaluation of the Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index
About a month ago I put some initial reactions to the Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index into a public note. I received some requests to do a more formal version of the same and have finally been able to do so at http://z.umn.edu/trdci. It's a Google Doc that should be public and should allow comments.
Our trial period ended in early December and it may be that some of the problems I describe have since been resolved. It's also possible that some of the oddities I noted would not have been present had we subscribed. Nonetheless, even if all the problems went away and it was a perfect version of itself, I'm still not sure that the UMN libraries would have chosen to subscribe. The annual fee was very, very steep.
Data Citation Resources
The Special Interest Group on Data Citation (SIGDC) maintains a page of Data Citation Resources with lists of relevant workshops, blogs, papers, presentations, websites, and organizations. All IASSIST members are welcome to join SIGDC and can submit ideas for resources to add to the list via our Google Group email.
Data Citation Counts!
Heather Piwowar of Duke & the University of British Columbia describes the results of her analysis of re-use of cited datasets in Data Citation Counts! Spoiler Alert: citation increases re-use. Particularly interesting: not only has re-use increased, but re-use of multiple datasets at a time is also increasing. Neat.
The R Guide to ESDS Large-Scale Government Surveys
ESDS Government has produced a new guide, The R Guide to ESDS Large-Scale Government Surveys. The aim of this guide is to provide an introduction to analysing large scale government surveys with the help of the R statistical software package.
The guide focuses on providing step-by-step examples of common operations most users carry out in the course of their research: how to open data sets, do basic data manipulation operations, produce simple descriptive statistics or weighted contingency tables.
It should be noted however that this guide is not an introduction to R. Beginners should use it in conjunction with one of the more comprehensive guides available online. Links and information about R resources are available at the end of the guide, which is available from http://www.esds.ac.uk/government/resources/analysis/
