  The data paper, an emerging scholarly genre, describes research datasets and
is intended to bridge the gap between the publication of research data and
scientific articles. Research examining how data papers report data events,
such as data transactions and manipulations, is limited. The research reported
on in this paper addresses this limitation and investigated how data events are
inscribed in data papers. A content analysis was conducted examining the full
texts of 82 data papers, drawn from the curated list of data papers connected
to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Data events recorded
for each paper were organized into a set of 17 categories. Many of these
categories are described together in the same sentence, which indicates the
messiness of data events in the laboratory space. The findings challenge the
degrees to which data papers are a distinct genre compared to research papers
and they describe data-centric research processes in a through way. This paper
also discusses how our results could inform a better data publication ecosystem
in the future.
