v2026.1CASRAI Dictionary 714 entries across 20 domains · CC-BY 4.0714 entries · CC-BY 4.0

Dictionary termTrack AStablev2026.2

Data paper

A peer-reviewed scholarly publication whose primary subject is a dataset — describing its collection, structure, processing, quality, and intended uses — published in a journal that specifically issues this format, accompanying the dataset itself in a FAIR-aligned repository.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A Scientific Data paper describing a 10-year ocean-current monitoring dataset

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A research article that uses a dataset to answer a question is not a data paper (the dataset is means, not subject)

Editorial commentary

Data papers were established to give citable scholarly credit for data curation work that produced reusable resources. Scientific Data (Nature Portfolio), Earth System Science Data (Copernicus), and Data in Brief (Elsevier) are exemplar venues. Data-paper review focuses on data quality and documentation, not on novel scientific claims from the data.

References

Wilkinson et al. 2016 Scientific Data (FAIR Principles)
Chavan and Penev 2011 ‘The data paper: a mechanism to incentivize data publishing’ BMC Bioinformatics

Also known as

Data descriptor · Dataset paper

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Data paper"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-paper" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "name": "Data paper",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-paper",
  "description": "A peer-reviewed scholarly publication whose primary subject is a dataset — describing its collection, structure, processing, quality, and intended uses — published in a journal that specifically issues this format, accompanying the dataset itself in a FAIR-aligned repository.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-outputs-expanded/",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-paper",
  "sameAs": [
    "Data descriptor",
    "Dataset paper"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}

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