citing data
Citing known sources of data is now a fairly routine practice in scholarly practice. However, big data presents some challenges . For example, data sourced from Twitter may be attributed to a particular Twitter handle that does not include the author’s real name. To cite a Twitter correctly, the Twitter handle and the author’s real name (the Modern Language Association provides guidelines on how to cite a Tweet). One also needs to identify the URL of that tweet – Twitter outlines how to find brazil rcs data the URL of an individual Tweet so it can be linked to individually (many people are unaware that all Tweets have an individual URL that provides the exact time and date that the Tweet was posted and also the amount of times that it has been favourited and re-tweeted).
When citing data, common assumptions, such as the assumption that all links to the data are persistent, must be dispelled: as noted by Christine L. Borgman in Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World, The MIT Press, 2 January 2015, “n a print world, citations are stable links between fixed objects. In a digital world, citations are links between mutable objects. Neither the citing nor the cited object may be fixed in form or location indefinitely.” One way to ensure that the data being cited can be located is to use a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which ensures that even if the location of the data changes, the DOI will always link to the data that were used. Nevertheless, although a DOI can be assigned to any physical, digital or abstract entity, big data sources such as social media are unlikely to have formal DOIs.