The recent release of the DataCite Data Citation corpus, which has the stated aim of providing “a trusted central aggregate of all data citations to further our understanding of data usage and advance meaningful data metrics” made me want to investigate what the current state of citing data in the area of chemistry might be. Chemistry is known to be a “data rich” science (as most of the physical sciences are) and here on this very blog I try to cite whenever possible the source(s) of the data that I often use when discussing a topic. Such citations are not necessarily the same as citing a journal source via e.g. its DOI, although of course one is very likely to find data associated with most articles nowadays, albeit almost entirely via any associated supporting information document. However the latter is often presented in a relatively unstructured (PDF) form, which does not adhere to what are called the “FAIR” guidelines of being findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Directly citing data is a way of improving its FAIR-characteristics. So what insights does the Data citation corpus reveal? (more…)