Cite Individual Media in the Main Text

Owned by Doug Boyer
Last updated: Mar 07, 2023 by Julie Winchester
2 min read

We recognize it is not always obvious how to cite data accessed or archived on MorphoSource.  Some guidance and requirements are provided in the ownership and permission section on media show pages in the "Cite as" field and in the use agreement that is packaged with each media you download.  In fact, the Common Requirements of All Use Agreements for accessing MorphoSource media specify how the media should be acknowledged and cited when used in publications.

In other words, it is fine and useful to note that "data were accessed on MorphoSource", "data are available on MorphoSource", or to provide information for the MorphoSource Project associated with media, but this is almost never sufficient from a 'best practice' perspective.  Somewhere (ideally in the main text) a full listing of each and every media record should be given. 

  1. Information to cite:
    1. Unique media identifiers: Always include DOI if available for each data file you viewed or downloaded. If there is no DOI, cite the ARK identifier. Citing media number can be useful, but is optional if ARK or DOI are provided.
    2. Specimen numbers: Always include either the official museum managed specimen identifier as a Darwin Core Triplet (Institution code: collection code: alphanumeric string; e.g., "UF:Herp:12345") or the occurrence ID (e.g., "urn:lod.ansp.org/catalog:ANSP:FISH:ANSP128940_0A343EA0-049E-4EDF-800F-43C02CA07A4C_2015-5-14").
    3. Grant numbers that funded creation of data: When funder information is available for a dataset, it is nice to continue crediting them to help show scholarly impact of funding decisions. Some contributors explicitly ask that their grants be cited upon re-use.
    4. Any publications the contributing author requests be cited when using the data: The most obvious case here is when you found out about particular MorphoSource datasets through data citation papers.
  2. Where to cite it:
    1. Unique media identifiers and specimen numbers should be cited in the main text or, if this is not possible, in the supplementary information of the paper. If there are just a few specimens, the information can be narrated in the methods section. If there are many specimens and scans, a separate table may be necessary.
    2. If citing grant numbers, this should probably done in text, next to each dataset, as well as in the acknowledgments section. If many funders were involved, a simple list of funders and grant numbers can be used. E.g., "Creation of datasets accessed on MorphoSource was made possible by the following funders and grant numbers: NSF DBI-1701714; Sloan Foundation Grant #5677; Sigma Xi Grant to J. Doe titled: "Why Pigs Can’t Fly Anymore" 2012...etc"
    3. As usual, publications like data citation papers should be cited in the bibliography of your article.

For examples of different ways of citing identifiers, check out https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219411.t002 which uses a main text DOI table for referencing a large number of scans and https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.1329, which references a smaller number of scans in the data citation statement. Again, other solutions are also possible like an in-text list of DOIs and ARKs or simply including the DOI or ARK after in-text references to a specimen or scan.