The text below is a template for emailing the BLE team about how to properly cite BLE data. You can send this out annually, or when you notice someone not following directions.
Dear BLE,
It'd be helpful if you're involved in any papers that reference BLE data if you would cite specific datasets. Each of our datasets comes with a DOI like this one, https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/33148f09ef3e5854ed285d9603f53dc4, so they're ready to be cited. Citing the datasets helps us track which data are referenced by which journal articles, and it also makes it much, much easier for someone to get the data they just read about. Citing with a DOI is better than saying the data are "on our website" or "at the Environmental Data Initiative", because the DOI should still work long after our website and EDI have crumbled to dust.
In many cases you can cite the data in the References section like any other journal article. If you follow the DOI linked above, you'll see an example citation that you can paste into your paper, or you can give the DOI to a reference manager like Zotero or EndNote and let it build the citation for you.
If the journal won't allow you to cite data in the References section, you can at least mention the package ID in the figure or text where the data is described. When you go to the landing page for one of our datasets in EDI, you can find the package ID on that page. It's also at the end of the URL, e.g., the knb-lter-ble.7.4 in https://portal.edirepository.org/nis/mapbrowse?packageid=knb-lter-ble.7.4.
And don't forget to mention BLE in the acknowledgements. Here's some example text:
This work was funded by the Beaufort Lagoon Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research program (BLE LTER) under National Science Foundation award #1656026.
Thanks!