11.9 Citing Data from OBIS

Depending on how you access data from OBIS, there are different ways you should cite downloaded datasets.

General OBIS citation:

OBIS (YEAR) Ocean Biodiversity Information System. Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. https://obis.org.

For individual datasets retrieved from OBIS (dataset citations are available in the zip downloads as html file):

[Dataset citation available from metadata] [Data provider details] (Available: Ocean Biodiversity Information System. Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. https://obis.org. Accessed: YYYY-MM-DD).

For example:

Sousa Pinto, I., Viera, R. (Year: if not provided use year from dataset publication date) Monitoring of the intertidal biodiversity of rocky beaches with schools in Portugal 2005-2010. CIIMAR - Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research, Porto. (Available: Ocean Biodiversity Information System. Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. https://obis.org. Accessed: 2024-01-01)

When data represents a subset of many datasets taken from the integrated OBIS database (e.g. downloaded from the Mapper), you can, in addition to citing the individual datasets (and taking into account the restrictions set at each dataset level), also cite the OBIS database as follows:

OBIS (YEAR) [Data e.g. Distribution records of Eledone cirrhosa (Lamarck, 1798)] (Available: Ocean Biodiversity Information System. Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. https://obis.org. Accessed: YYYY-MM-DD)

The derived information products from OBIS are published under the CC0 license and can be cited as follows:

OBIS (YEAR) [Information product e.g. Global map showing the Hulbert index in a gridded view of hexagonal cells] (Available: Ocean Biodiversity Information System. Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. https://obis.org. Accessed: YYYY-MM-DD)