How to reference digital objects in your paper

Published

2025-04-28

When writing a paper, researchers have several options for how to cite their research compendium, open data, as well as code they used.

How to reference datasets you use or other people’s code?

The best place to reference others’ code or open datasets is in the bibliography. Ideally these should have a Digitial Object Identifier (or DOI) so they are unique and can be easily found. There may be harder cases, which are detailed out in more detail in separate articles:

How to reference data or code created as part of the research?

As there will be digital byproducts that are made available alongside the research (the research compendium and any new datasets created), inspired by the FAIR research code approach, the project has guidance on how to reference that in the paper so that others can easily find it. We recommend adding two headers just after the conclusion and before the references section

… conclusion of the paper

Data availability

Summarize where datasets created as part of the paper are published. This could be on a data repository like Zenodo for instance.

Code availability

Add link to the GitHub repository where the research compendium is published.

References

… rest of the references

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