The SSH Data Citation Service, a tool to explore and collect citation metadata

This paper presents the SSH Data Citation Service (DCS), a software tool that provides functionalities to find, collect and analyse metadata related to digital objects, in particular datasets, referred to in citation strings. Starting from the citation string of a dataset, the DCS aggregates metadata related to the data from different sources: the repository hosting the dataset, PID Registration Agencies and Knowledge Graphs and gives a unified view of information about datasets coming from these sources. The DCS has been designed and developed in the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) project. It has been used in a project activity as a tool to help investigate approaches adopted for data citation by Social Sciences and Humanities organisations managing data repositories, and as an utility to help data managers to create citation metadata. The paper presents motivations underlying the creation of the tool, the design principles adopted, an overall description of the functionalities of the current release and a summary of ongoing activities.