View Categories

How can Figshare help my research?

Sharing research data on Figshare can help promote your research and raise your profile as a researcher. It has also been reported that, ‘sharing detailed research data is associated with increased citation rate’ for published articles.

An ever-growing list of why researchers should practice open science is listed on Quora. Similarly, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) makes the case for research data management in their briefing paper to help managers in research institutions build support for developing new services for research data management.

Furthermore, making your research (data) available allows you to:

  • Trust your own data and allow others to do the same by giving them the resources to check and verify your published work
  • Tailor the way you use Figshare to suit your needs, such as using the free private storage to simply manage your data and share private links with reviewers.
  • Use Figshare seamlessly integrates with other tools such as Github and so Figshare can be used to make the data persistent. Therefore, you own your data and you control how it is shared – we give you full autonomy.
  • Showcase your data with slides and posters that are easy to share and download or quick to view within the Figshare browser.
  • Securely store and back up data and metadata using a robust, reliable cloud based infrastructure (in Figshare’s case, AWS S3). With many funders now making it a requirement to keep your data, Figshare provides a safe environment to do so.

To read how others have used Figshare we created a collection of Figshare case studies for different disciplines.

What can I upload to Figshare?

Anything academic. You can upload all of your research outputs to Figshare. When you make your research outputs publicly available, you can choose the type of research that you are sharing. See the list of current item types to get an idea of what others are sharing. Figshare previews over 1,200 file type extensions in the browser and a full list of supported extensions available in these user guides.

When you publish on Figshare your data is given a DOI to help you track the attention, reuse (citations, references, etc.), and potential impact of your research.

What is a DOI?

DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier and is a type of persistent identifier (PID). As the name suggests these are persistent and so provide a permanent link to your research, even if the URL where your item ‘lives’ changes. For example, if Figshare modifies the structure of item URLs to adapt to new web standards, it will update the DOI registry with the new URLs. Anyone who finds a citation/reference for your work using the DOI will be able to click the DOI and be taken to your work even though the URL changed. If someone cited your work using the old URL, they could see a 404 error depending on if redirects are in place. So, always use your DOI, and encourage other to do the same, to reference your work!

Figshare is a DataCite node and so items published on Figshare are issued DataCite DOIs. This means the metadata you enter is searchable in DataCite’s global search interface: https://commons.datacite.org/

In order to meet with DataCite metadata requirements, Figshare requires users to add the following information before making files public and citable: Title, author list (ordered), categories (set ontology), tags (free text) and a description with as much context as needed to interpret the files. Users can also add links to other digital objects. Institutional clients can define additional custom metadata when implementing Figshare and can map these fields to DataCite fields. Importantly, the DOI cannot be deleted but the item can be modified post-publication, triggering a new version.

Was this helpful?