  Standardizing and incentivizing the use of digital object identifiers (DOIs)
to aggregate and identify both data analyzed and data generated by a research
project will advance the field of astronomy to match best practices in other
research fields like geosciences and medicine. Increase in the use of DOIs will
prepare the discipline for changing expectations among funding agencies and
publishers, who increasingly expect accurate and thorough data citation to
accompany scientific outputs. The use of DOIs ensures a robust, sustainable,
and interoperable approach to data citation in which due credit is given to
researchers and institutions who produce and maintain the primary data. We
describe in this work the advantages of DOIs for data citation and best
practices for integrating a DOI service in an astronomical archive. We report
on a pilot project carried out in collaboration with AAS Journals. During the
course of the 1.5 year pilot, over 75% of submitting authors opted to use the
integrated DOI service to clearly identify data analyzed during their research
project when prompted at the time of paper submission.
