Research & Scholarly Publications Team: Reference Management

Reference Management

Reference management software helps you keep track of your citations as you work and partially automates the process of constructing bibliographies when it is time to publish.

Coventry University Library has information on RefWorks and  Endnote. For further information about RefWorks please contact your designated academic liaison librarian. For support in relation to Endnote specifically please contact Chris Bark (C.Bark@coventry.ac.uk).

Citing data

The Research and Scholarly Publications Team help and encourage researchers to share and register data, and make it more stable and easier to cite by obtaining a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). For more on this topic please see the DOI Requests tab within the Research Data Management part of this libguide. Please ask for further guidance by contacting the Team​.

A Proposed Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Quantitative Data, by Dr. Micha Altman and Prof. David Florence (2007) proposes the need for a universal standard for citing quantitative data and provides some examples citations.

How do I cite data from digital repositories (online open archives), data centres, and public sources?

There is no consensus on format and components for citations of electronic data; Emerging conventions vary by discipline, but there are common elements within these conventions.

The How to Cite Data page by The Michigan State University Libraries provides helpful guidelines for multiple citation styles, including a tab that leads to guidance for citing data from statistical tables.

The guidelines for social science data​ provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may give you a good general sense of what you will need to include in most data citations.

Many online repositories or data centres provide guidelines on how to cite the data that they maintain and provide. These vary dramatically in detail and visibility.

For example, census.ac.uk, which provides specific types of data sets, often repeating over time, provides thorough guidelines on citing each electronic release of census data and related studies. The UK Data Archive, which houses a wider variety of data sets, includes general data citation advice in an FAQ (How do I acknowledge and cite data?), and includes the specific citation information for each data set when you download it.

If you can't find it, you should always feel free to email or call the staff who run the site for advice on citing their data (or any other sort of material in the repository).