Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A journal's data-citation policy stating it 'follows the FORCE11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles' is citing this specific 2014 document as its policy basis, not an unrelated or later data-citation standard
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
This term is not the eight principles themselves — for the substantive content of what the principles actually require (importance, credit, evidence, identification, access, persistence, specificity, interoperability), see the separate term for the data citation principles
Editorial commentary
The Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles is the specific named 2014 document produced by FORCE11‘s Data Citation Synthesis Group. This term covers the Declaration as a document and initiative — its origin, drafting process, and governance role; for the substantive content of what it requires, see data citation principle, which lists and explains the eight principles themselves.
How the Declaration came about
The Declaration was not written from scratch. The Data Citation Synthesis Group deliberately synthesised several earlier, independently developed statements on data citation — including a 2012 US National Academies report, guidance from DataCite, and work from the CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation — into a single consolidated set that the field’s disparate existing efforts could converge on rather than compete with. That synthesis approach is a large part of why the resulting eight principles became the de facto reference point rather than one of several competing data-citation standards.
What it is not
The Declaration is a set of citation-practice principles, not a technical metadata schema — it does not specify field names or a serialization format the way the DataCite Metadata Schema does, and it predates and is distinct from the FAIR Data Principles (published two years later, in 2016), which address data stewardship and reuse more broadly rather than citation practice specifically. It is also not a data-sharing mandate in itself; individual funders and journals separately decide whether and how to require compliance with it.
Adoption and ongoing role
The Declaration has been endorsed by more than a hundred publisher, funder, and infrastructure organisations, and its eight principles were operationalised in the years that followed — feeding into journal data-citation requirements, repository landing-page best practice, and the citation-related sections of the FAIR Principles. It remains the standard reference cited whenever a journal, funder, or repository states that it “follows” data citation best practice.
References
- Data Citation Synthesis Group, ‘Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles’, FORCE11, 2014 (force11.org/datacitationprinciples).
Also known as
Force11 Data Citation Declaration
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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