There are a variety of journals that publish articles about data. These "data journals" can be helpful in finding data and understanding it. Some journals will publish "data papers" that describe a data set in detail. They are sometimes peer-reviewed, and they are often accompanied by metadata.
According to a 2011 paper by Chavan & Peney in BMC Bioinformatics, "a data paper is a journal publication whose primary purpose is to describe data, rather than to report a research investigation. As such, it contains facts about data, not hypotheses and arguments in support of those hypotheses based on data, as found in a conventional research article. Its purposes are threefold: to provide a citable journal publication that brings scholarly credit to data publishers; to describe the data in a structured human-readable form; and to bring the existence of the data to the attention of the scholarly community."
Below is a list of data journals and journals that publish data papers.
