Adopting the Trømso Recommendations in academic publishing
The Tromsø recommendations for citation of research data in linguistics
Data is central to empirical linguistic research. Linguistic data comes in many different forms, and is collected and processed with a wide range of methods. Data citation recognizes the centrality of data to research. Furthermore, it facilitates verification of claims and repurposing of data for other studies.
The Tromsø Recommendations provide clear guidance for data citation for referencing language data, both in the bibliography and in the text of linguistics publications. The recommendations have been written to account for the rich variety of linguistic data, and include clear guidance and examples.
The Linguistics Data Interest Group (LDIG, a working group in the Research Data Alliance) have developed the Tromsø Recommendations in collaboration with linguists working in a range of disciplines.
Making the Tromsø Recommendations part of academic publishing
The next step is to help encourage citation of data by encouraging journals to include the Tromsø Recommendations in their instructions for authors.
The LDIG has launched a campaign to encourage publishers, archives and other groups that present linguistic data to adopt the Tromsø Recommendations.
What would it look like to include the Tromsø Recommendations in academic publishing?
The Tromsø Recommendations cover all types of linguistic data, and have citation formats for all levels of detail - from a whole corpus to a single line of a text. They are designed to focus on content, not style, so they work with the formatting for a particular journal.
To include the recommendations can be as minimal as adding a line of text like this to a publication’s Information for Authors page:
<Journal Name> [encourages|requires] the citation of linguistic data in all published articles. Citation structure should follow the The Tromsø Recommendations for Citation of Research Data in Linguistics. For more on the importance of data citation see The Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics.
How can I help support the Tromsø Recommendations in academic publishing?
If you are a journal or series editor, member of a journal editorial board or publisher, update your author instructions to encourage authors to include data citation.
If you are a contributor to a journal in your field or popular publisher, write to the editors and ask them to consider adopting the Tromsø Recommendations. We have some suggested text for your email or letter in the next tab.
If you are a member of a PhD program, a funding body or a body that gives a linguistics award, consider adopting data citation as a category for assessment.
If you are a linguist or language scientist, encourage the journals, societies, funding and awards bodies you are a member of to take up the Tromsø Recommendations.
For this last group, we’ve created a spreadsheet that has email templates, background information and a spreadsheet where we are tracking which journals have been contacted, and whether they’ve adopted the Tromsø Recommendations: bit.ly/trecs-campaign
You do not have to be an LDIG or RDA member to be involved! Also, if the journals you publish in do not immediately adopt the Tromsø Recommendations for the whole publication, you can always adopt them yourself for the next thing you publish!
See also:
The Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics
Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field (article)
Data transparency and citation in the journal Gesture (article)
Putting practice into words: The state of data and methods transparency in grammatical descriptions (article)
Reflections on reproducible research, in Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998 (article)
