Skip to Main Content

GIS (Geographic Information Systems)

Start here for general GIS questions.

Standards

A dataset citation includes many of the same components of a traditional citation.

Many style manuals have not developed specific instructions for citing data. If the style guide you are using does not address data citations, you may use the basic citation elements, regardless of the type of work.

  • author(s) (Who created the data? an organization, individual, group of individuals) ,
  • title (name of the study or title of the dataset),
  • year of publication,
  • publisher (or location of where the data was found)
  • edition/version
  • access information (URL/doi where data was found)

Several discipline specific resources are listed in the "Citation Guides" tab.

Since MLA has not developed a specific citation style for datasets, the general rules for citing a web document may be applied. 

  • Author Last Name, First Name. Title of data set. (Version). Publisher location: Publisher name, Date of publication. Medium of publication. Date accessed. doi/url of data


Example: