Citing NEON data¶

neon-mcp is only a conduit. The data it returns belong to the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and NEON's data policy — not this project's license — governs how you may use and must credit them. This page summarises that policy and shows how to build a correct citation from what the API (and therefore neon-mcp) gives you.

License: CC-BY 4.0¶

NEON releases its data and data products under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license¹. You may use, share and adapt them for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit. NEON asks that you cite each data product you use, at the release you used, and acknowledge NEON and the U.S. National Science Foundation in publications². Read the policy pages themselves before publishing; they are the authority and may change:

• Guidelines and policies
• Data policies and citation guidelines

Releases and DOIs¶

NEON publishes an annual release — a frozen, versioned snapshot of a data product's files (RELEASE-2021 through RELEASE-2026 exist as of September 2026). Every data product within a release has its own DOI, which is what you cite. Anything newer than the latest release is provisional: subject to reprocessing and without a DOI (see below).

The Data API exposes the DOI wherever a product meets a release³:

• GET /products/{productCode} returns releases[], each with release (the tag), generationDate, url and productDoi.url.
• GET /releases/{releaseTag} returns dataProducts[], each with productCode, productName and productDoi.

For example, Breeding landbird point counts (DP1.10003.001) in RELEASE-2026 carries productDoi.url = https://doi.org/10.48443/v6hs-mx57 (and RELEASE-2025 carries https://doi.org/10.48443/3nka-yg96). neon-mcp's product and release tools surface these fields, so an agent can assemble a citation without a second lookup.

How to cite a data product¶

NEON's recommended pattern² names the product, its code, the release, the DOI and the access date. neon-mcp's neon_get_citation tool renders exactly this wording (from the neon://guide/citing-neon-data resource), plus a BibTeX entry:

NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network). Product name (DPx.xxxxx.xxx), RELEASE-YYYY. https://doi.org/10.48443/xxxx-xxxx. Dataset accessed from https://data.neonscience.org on Month D, YYYY.

Filled in for Breeding landbird point counts in RELEASE-2026:

NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network). Breeding landbird point counts (DP1.10003.001), RELEASE-2026. https://doi.org/10.48443/v6hs-mx57. Dataset accessed from https://data.neonscience.org on September 10, 2026.

Cite every product you used, each at the release you actually downloaded. If you retrieved data through neon-mcp you may mention the tool in your methods, but the citation of record is always the NEON data product DOI. Never cite the signed download URLs: they expire after about seven days.

Provisional data¶

Availability listings from the API carry a PROVISIONAL pseudo-release tag alongside real release tags³. Provisional data:

• have no DOI and cannot be cited by one;
• may be revised, reprocessed or removed before they enter a release;
• are excluded from data queries by default and must be requested explicitly.

When neon-mcp shows a site-month only under PROVISIONAL, that data are not yet in any release. For reproducible work prefer a release; if you must use provisional data, say so and cite them by access date:

NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network). Product name (DPx.xxxxx.xxx), provisional data. Dataset accessed from https://data.neonscience.org on Month D, YYYY. Data archived at [your DOI].

Acknowledging NEON and NSF¶

NEON requests an acknowledgement in publications that use its data or samples²; its suggested wording is:

The National Ecological Observatory Network is a program sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated under cooperative agreement by Battelle. This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation through the NEON Program.

NEON also asks to be told about publications that use its data so it can track the observatory's impact; the citation-guidelines page explains how.

About neon-mcp itself¶

The neon-mcp server software is MIT-licensed by The Regents of the University of New Mexico⁴ and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NEON, Battelle or NSF. See License for the software and documentation licenses.