So here’s a thing. A while ago, I asked whether there was any way to quantify the extent to which archaeologists were citing their reuse of data. I used the Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics Data Citation Index (DCI) as a starting point, but it didn’t go too well … Back then, the DCI indicated that 56 of the 476 data studies derived from the UK’s Archaeology Data Service repository had apparently been cited elsewhere in the Web of Science databases (the figure is currently 58 out of 515). But I also found that the citations themselves were problematic: the citation of the published paper/volume was frequently incomplete or abbreviated, many appeared to be self-citations from within interim or final reports, in some cases the citations preceded the dates of the project being referenced, and in many instances it was possible to demonstrate that the data had been cited (in some form or other) but this had not been captured in the DCI. At that point I concluded that the DCI was of little value at present. So what was going on?
