“The production of research data is increasing rapidly, meaning that it is now rarely possible to publish the data that underpins a piece of research within the article describing that research. Yet, if the conclusions drawn from the research are to stand up to scrutiny, then the data must be made available, and a permanent link made between the data and the publication. Data citation is promoted as an easily understood way of making this link, while at the same time providing the dataset creators with the attribution and credit they deserve for making their data available for verification checks and reproducibility tests. This paper discusses data citation principles and gives examples of data citation and other forms of data-publication linking in practice.”