Is there an established way to tag data citations in an article reference list?
I.e., if one of the entries in the article’s references contains a DataCite DOI pointing to a dataset, can it be usefully tagged to identify it as a data citation? This would mean that the Crossref metadata connects the article with the dataset.
Looking at the Crossref schema I haven’t found an obvious way to do this – there is the <dataset> element, but that’s a child of <database> and so doesn’t make sense here. To my mind what is needed is either an attribute/child element of <doi> communicating ‘this is a DataCite DOI’ or an attribute/child element of <citation> communicating ‘this is a data citation’.
My colleague Rachael Lammey, together with Helena Cousijn from DataCite, wrote a post for our blog in 2018 about data citation, which you can find here. That illustrates two options for capturing data citation - one using the <citation> tags like you would for any other kinds of references and the other using relationship metadata.
That’s unrelated to citations. We allow registration of datasets the same way we allow registration of journal articles, books, dissertations, etc. The <dataset> tag contains the metadata for a given registered dataset the same way that <journal_article> contains the metadata for a given registered journal article. <database> is a parent/container element for datasets, the same way that <journal> is a parent/container element for journal articles.
The way the schema is currently constructed, <citation> doesn’t declare the content type being cited in any instance, but it tries to capture enough descriptive metadata using the other tags to clearly identify the object being cited.
One distinction of using the relationship method is that it allows for a free text description in a <description> tag where you could clarify that the referenced item is a dataset.
Please let me know if you have additional questions.