Databases

Researchers Get Faster Access to Datasets

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/08/16

Research publisher Elsevier and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) have teamed up to provide linking between research articles and related datasets. The latter is an international consortium of academic institutions and research organizations housed within the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. It seeks out research data and pertinent documents from researchers and works to "process, preserve and disseminate" that data. It also provides education, training and instructional resources to help users understand how to work with research data.

Under the new agreement, more than 400 Elsevier journals will offer direct linking options with datasets in the ICPSR collection. The datasets will become "discoverable" through corresponding research articles on Elsevier's ScienceDirect, a scientific database that offers journal articles and book chapters. The link will enable researchers to access the underlying research data while reading the research paper and even reuse the data for their own experiments. Likewise, as people are accessing the ICPSR datasets, they'll be able to access the articles on ScienceDirect.

"Providing links between research data and the articles based on analyses of those data is crucial to support the efforts related to both data sharing and the transparency around conducting research in general," said Linda Detterman, director of membership and marketing at ICPSR, in a prepared statement. "These direct links offer a way to demonstrate the impact of research data for both the principal investigator and the agency funding the research. ICPSR is pleased to be working with Elsevier to establish reciprocal linking with ScienceDirect."

Wouter Haak, a vice president of research data management solutions at Elsevier, added that the combination will ensure that authors of the data and articles "get the credit they deserve."

This isn't the first data linkage set up by Elsevier. The company already collaborates with 54 other data repositories.