Tracing data footprints: formal and informal data citations in the scientific literature

Data citation has become a prevalent practice within the scientific community, serving the purpose of facilitating data discovery, reproducibility, and credit attribution. Consequently, data has gained significant importance in the scholarly process. Despite its growing prominence, data citation is still at an early stage, with considerable variations in practices observed across scientific domains. Such diversity hampers the ability to consistently analyze, detect, and quantify data citations. We focus on the European Marine Science (MES) community to examine how data is cited in this specific context. We identify four types of data citations: formal, informal, complete, and incomplete. By analyzing the usage of these diverse data citation modalities, we investigate their impact on the widespread adoption of data citation practices.