IJAFR is committed to improving scholarly communications and as part of this commitment, authors may make materials, data and associated protocols available to readers. The preferred way to do this is to publicly deposit the data as noted below. Supplemental material can mean anything from tables to datasets, filesets to presentations, video to audio files. Including supplemental material with your article makes it more discoverable, and IJAFR will ensure it is effectively linked to, within your article abstract.
Why include supplemental material with your journal article?
- It makes your article more discoverable, giving people another route to find your research.
- Other researchers can cite your supplemental material, increasing the impact of your work.
- Funders are able to identify clear links to data, ensuring you meet your funding requirements.
- Your supplemental data is effectively preserved.
- Research shows that articles with supplemental material are downloaded and cited more often.
To support this, if you wish, IJAFR can include links on your article abstract to the associated data.
How do I link my article to its data?
If you are considering publishing an article with us, and wish to link to supplemental material hosted in a particular data bank, please follow these steps:
- Submit your datasets to an appropriate public data repository. Data should be submitted to discipline-specific, community-recognized repositories where possible, or to generalist repositories if no suitable community resource is available.
- Where suitable domain-specific repositories do not exist, authors may deposit in, for example, Dryad, Dataverse, the Open Science Framework, or an institutional repository and provide the correct access information with the manuscript. Alternatively, authors may choose to deposit non-standard data (including figures, posters, rich media) on Figshare for example. In all cases, the correct data DOI reference (where applicable) should be provided when submitting the final version of your article.
- In all cases, the correct accession/deposition reference numbers/data DOIs must be provided in the manuscript.
- Remember to check that the licensing policies of the data repository that you choose are suitable for your purposes. The DataCite organisation has a growing list of repositories for research data.
- Please remember to update your chosen data bank with the article DOI on publication.
Are my data files subject to peer/editorial review?
No, we don’t expect that the data files will be subject to any special data review or scrutiny.