Data citation

For better or worse, citations are here stay.  Citations have the capacity to serve as a proxy estimate of uptake or use by the community of ones products.  Fortunately, the range of acceptable scientific products is rapidly expanding, datasets in many forms continue to serve as pivotal resources, and big data syntheses are reshaping the standards for acceptable derived evidence.  Data citations are defined, general rules provided, and the unique elements of datasets described such as versioning and persistent identifiers.  The cultural and scientific discovery implications of data citations are also described focusing on emerging linked-data futures.