Make Data Count (MDC) was launched in 2014 when CDL, DataCite, and DataONE received a two-year Sloan Foundation grant to address a major gap in scholarly communication. While journal articles benefit from established metrics like citations and views, research data lacked consistent, community-defined measures of use and impact. MDC’s primary goal is to elevate research data to first-class scholarly output by building the technical and social infrastructure needed to track data usage and citation metrics.
UC3 has been a core collaborator from the start, contributing to the development of tools, standards, and services. CDL’s involvement continues today through leadership, advisory participation, infrastructure support, and community outreach. As part of this work, UC3’s Daniella Lowenberg and John Chodacki published Open Data Metrics: Lighting the Fire (2019), a book that reflects on the evolution of data metrics and sets out a vision for transparent, standardized, community driven approaches to measuring the reach and impact of research data.
In recent years, MDC has extended its mission through the Data Citation Corpus. The Corpus is built in partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Wellcome Trust and designed to aggregate, mine, and visualize data citations across the scholarly record, including citations to research data from articles, pre-prints, and other scholarly outputs. It addresses a long-standing gap, as the community has lacked a comprehensive, openly available way to track the citations of datasets at scale. The Corpus bridges this gap by compiling millions of citations into a CC0-licensed dataset with a visualization dashboard that enables funders, institutions, and researchers to better assess the impact of research data.