When you write a paper for one of our books or journals, we encourage you to refer to underlying or relevant datasets or software, citing them in the text and including them as a full reference in the References section of your paper. You should always consider data and software to be citable products of your research. As a signatory to COPDESS’ statement of commitment and a society devoted to advancing the geosciences, the Geological Society of London also encourages you to make your own data available and archived in an appropriate publicly accessible repository. We can link to these data in the paper and can archive them for you in our Figshare portal as ‘Supplementary material’ if you haven’t already deposited your data in a community-approved repository. Check out our data policy here for further information on suitable repositories.

Archiving and citing these data and software will help your community in a number of ways:

• Facilitate reproducibility and data reuse, making it easier for others to build on your work
• Maximize visibility of your (and others’) data
• Foster transparency
• Credit the work involved in compiling the datasets or creating the software

When you do cite a data or software reference in your References, remember to include these elements if possible:

Data

• author(s) of the data
• year(s) dataset compiled
• dataset title
• the repository or archive
• the version (if more than one exists)
• the persistent identifier.

Software

• Name of software
• Date created
• Names of software
• Authors/contributors
• Location/repository
• Citable DOI of software

Examples

Software: 

Vermeesch, P. 2018. IsoplotR, https://github.com/pvermees/IsoplotRgui, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2018.04.001

Data: 

Smith, J. & Brown, D. 2014. Late Cretaceous extension and Palaeogene rotation-related contraction in Central Anatolia recorded in the Ayhan-Büyükkışla basin. Figshare, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12345

You can help us identify whether your reference is a data or software reference by including something like [data ref] or [software] when you add the details to your References. We will remove this later but it aids us when it comes to coding the reference correctly.

In the near future we will be moving towards including a data availability statement in our publications so that you can let readers know how much of your data are available, where they are housed or whether commercial constraints mean that you cannot make the data publicly available. You may find that a statement of this nature is a requirement of the body funding your research. We’ll let you know when this happens.

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Best wishes

The Production Team