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Data notes - making it easier to publish your hidden data

Valuable data often go unpublished when it could be helping to progress science. Hence, we launched Data notes - a short article type allowing you to describe your data and publish it to make your data easier to find, cite and share.


Data notes are peer-reviewed, indexed publications, and benefit from in-house guidance on best data practice.


Have a look at our infographic that outlines what information goes into a Data note and how it's laid out. 

Publish a Data note and get credit for sharing your data

Easier for you to share

Don't leave your work languishing on a hard drive: deposit your datasets in an open repository and publish a data note describing them, allowing others to find, use and cite your data.

Easier for others to find

All BMC Research Notes publications - including data notes - are indexed in MEDLINE, PubMed, PubMed Central, SCImago, Scopus and many other services. Articles are also available through the BMC and SpringerLink sites for maximal discoverability of your work.

Quick and easy to write

Just download and follow our template. A Data note consists of three main sections (objective, data description and limitations). 

A Data note is purely a description of data available in an open repository, and requires no analysis or interpretation.

Data note template

Quick to publish

Your Data note will be peer-reviewed and our in-house data experts will provide guidance on sharing and describing the datasets. 

Our prompt service means that Data notes submitted in 2019 had an average time to final decision of under 50 days.

Submit your Data note

Did you know...?

A recent study showed that linking articles to the supporting data in a repository was associated with an average 25% increase in citations.

Sirisena et al. published the data from their BMC Cancer article. Find the Data note here or through the cross-link on their article.

Auer et al. published the data from their BMC Geriatrics article. Find the Data note here or through the cross-link on their article.

A data note is suitable for any data. It can be for the unpublished data from an article, or it could be for data that didn't make it into a paper - or data you plan to use in a future research article!

We accept data in a range of formats including:

  • spreadsheets
  • videos
  • image files
  • audio files
  • maps
  • code
  • word documents

About BMC Research Notes

BMC Research Notes is a forum across all scientific disciplines for short reports and data descriptors. We believe simple but sound observations deserve a platform. We publish two article types - the Research note and the Data note.

Annual Journal Metrics

  • 2022 Citation Impact
    1.8 - 2-year Impact Factor
    4.0 - 5-year Impact Factor
    0.869 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
    0.534 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

    2023 Speed
    20 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
    191 days submission to accept (Median)

    2023 Usage 
    4,067,459 downloads
    2,370 Altmetric mentions