How to make your Storymap citable?(eg with Digital Object Identifier)

Question

I would like to make my Storymap citable in scientific publications. This typically requires a DOI (digital object identifier). Various websites such as zenodo.org and f1000research.com allow one to archive documents and receive a DOI. But a quick search shows zero storymaps on these sites. One could print a storymap to pdf and upload that as a workaround. (Another site, sciencebase.gov, does have storymaps on it). My questions are:

1) Can anyone provide an example of a storymap which has a DOI, and/or has been cited in a scientific publication?

2) What is best practice, and what is the best repository website (of those mentioned above, or others), for doing this?

RupertEssinger · Answer

Dawn Wright‌ has also kindly written a blog post about this topic:

> Making Story Maps Citable (e.g., with Digital Object Identifiers)

CharlesCarroll · Answer

Thanks, really helpful and comprehensive info!

DawnWright · Answer

For a story map, I would suggest that everything first start with the item page/home page on arcgis.com. That's where you would put as much descriptive information as possible. Then I go to ResearchGate as a second step, mainly to get the DOI. Once I get the DOI from ResearchGate, I add that DOI to the other existing descriptive information on arcgis.com.

In ResearchGate you can add a story map as "code" or "presentation" or "poster." As long as you do indeed upload a pdf of the story map it will accept that as an item for which it can assign a new DOI. Most of my story maps were actually refashioned as 4 x 6 ft posters that I presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting. AGU (and other organizations) will of course give you a full citation to use for any abstract of a poster or oral presentation that you give at that meeting. So if your presentation is a story map, there is one reference for you. But these organizations are not (yet) assigning DOIs to those abstracts.

I categorize a couple of my story maps as "code" on ResearchGate because I built the story map on a server other than arcgis.com. I include the pdf of the story map as well as the HTML code. But again, the main purpose of this is to get the DOI from ResearchGate. And of course, you can include similar descriptive information on ResearchGate as an overview of the story map, but ResearchGate does not give you as many options for description as arcgis.com does.

Several of us at Esri met earlier this year to discuss the implications and a possible way forward for Esri to more fully support DOIs within ArcGIS.com and the Living Atlas of the World. At this time we are not able to "mint" DOIs for items in ArcGIS Online, including for story maps, but it seems feasible at this time to let others provide that service, such as ResearchGate, Zenodo (perhaps even OGC at some point), who are already DOI naming authorities/"minters." Within the federal government, NOAA and USGS are doing wonderful work with DOIs too, but mainly for datasets. Story maps fall into an interesting category as they encompass datasets but also narrative text that could essentially be in a journal article.

Cc Owen Evans Marten Hogeweg Rupert Essinger Clint Brown Andrew Turner Joseph Kerski