Guides: Finding Data: Data Journals

Data Journals

The following list provides representative, but not exhaustive, examples of journals that can help you identify and locate data and data sets that have been made publicly available.

Most of these journals publish "data papers" that describe specific data sets - what data were collected, when, where, how, what software packages were used, where to access the data, etc. - rather than analyze the data. The papers link to the data set location. Some journals are dedicated to publishing only data papers and articles on topics related to data management and use. Others include data papers along with standard types of articles, such as research articles and reviews. A few are the traditional type of data journal that publishes only articles focused on presenting data in those articles.

For more listings of data journals, check these sources:

A Growing List of Data Journals
From Data@MLibrary (2014).
Open Data Journals
From the FOSTER project.
Sources of Dataset Peer Review
From the Edinburgh DataShare Wiki.

Archaeology

Internet Archaeology
Open access. Publishes peer-reviewed data papers along with other articles. Includes referee comment on potential re-use and significance of the data.
Journal of Open Archaeology Data
Open access. Publishes peer-reviewed data papers. Includes a wide variety of data types: GIS data and maps, images and videos, site plans, notebooks, survey data, ethnographic data, artifact illustrations and measurements, remote sensing data, bioarchaeological data.

Biosciences

Biodiversity Data Journal
Open access and community peer-reviewed. Publishes articles in all aspects of biodiversity science with taxonomic, morphological, genomic, phylogenic, ecological, and other types of data. Includes supplementary data with articles and data papers describing databases with biodiversity, ecological, and environmental data. Publishes descriptions of relevant software tools. Aims to make contents both human-readable and machine-readable and to integrate the data with the text as much as possible.
GigaScience
Open access. Publishes research data, articles, and other types of research objects. Covers 'big data' studies from all life and biomedical sciences, including 'omics,' imaging, neuroscience, ecology, cohort data, systems biology, and more. Associated platforms host the associated data (GigaDB) and data analysis tools, computational methods, and workflows (GigaGalaxy).

Geosciences

Earth System Science Data
Open access. Publishes data articles (planning, instrumentation, collection), methods articles (non-trivial statistical, instrumentation, operational), and reivew articles (compare data sets or methods, evaluate data sets or methods for specific purposes). Subject coverage includes the atmosphere, oceanography, biosphere, geology/geosciences, cryosphere, hydrology and soil science, solar-terrestrial science, and data, algorithms, and models.
Geoscience Data Journal
Open access. Publishes Data Papers covering weather and climate, oceanography, atmospheric and ocean chemistry, cryosphere, biosphere and land surface, and geology.

Physics

Nuclear Data Sheets
Primarily publishes evaluated nuclear structure and decay data based on review and analysis of available experimental results. Special issues focus on nuclear reactions data.

University of Pittsburgh Library System

Course & Subject Guides

Finding Data

Data Journals

Archaeology

Biosciences

Geosciences

Physics