NSHD Digital Object Identifiers

As a general rule you should cite as many of the above as fits with the time span of your research dataset.  For example if your dataset included data from the years 1961 to 1999, you would cite one NSHD DOI (doi: 10.5522/NSHD/Q101), whereas if your dataset included data from the 2006 – 2012 data collection you would cite both doi: 10.5522/NSHD/Q101 and doi: 10.5522/NSHD/Q102.

DOIs can be cited in the acknowledgements section of a paper unless there is a specific data availability section (e.g PLOS journals).

Example

Data used in this publication are available to bona fide researchers upon request to the NSHD Data Sharing Committee via a standard application procedure.  Further details can be found at http://www.nshd.mrc.ac.uk/data.  doi: 10.5522/NSHD/Q101; doi: 10.5522/NSHD/Q102;doi: 10.5522/NSHD/S102A

Alternatively some journals may ask for DOIs to be included as a reference.

As with traditional publications, there are different formats for citing DOIs.  Irrespective of the style chosen, e.g. API, Chicago, etc., the important elements to be included are:

• Identifier
• Creator
• Title
• Publisher
• Publication year

For example, the above elements for the first NSHD DOI above are as follows:

• Identifier: 10.5522/NSHD/Q101
• Creator: Douglas, James; Wadsworth, Michael; Kuh, Diana
• Title: MRC NSHD 1946-2005 Data
• Publisher: MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at UCL
• Publication year: 2015

The above fields would look like this using the APA reference style:

Douglas, J., Wadsworth, M., & Kuh, D. (2015). MRC NSHD 1946-2005 Data. MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at UCL.

Notice that the DOI is prefixed by the string http://dx.doi.org/ in the citation.