Can publicly available datasets which are hosted in Github be used in research papers? I am in a dilemma. I have used an old publicly available dataset for some of my analysis and want to publish it. But the problem is that it was publicly available and hosted in a website (infochimps.com) some 4 years ago. But now it's not available there and I got the data from a Github repository. It's not possible to reach the owner of the dataset as the email id given in the readme file is no longer valid. But recently there have been some analyses on the web which have used this data directly from the github repo.

So my question is can I use this data for my paper? And if yes, how to cite it?
I can think of at least a couple issues.


Is the data actually available for use? Just because it is on Github does not necessarily mean that you can legally use it. You still need to determine how the data is licensed (easy if a license is published with the data, possibly difficult otherwise). I'm not exactly sure how data on Github is treated, but code published on Github is "All Rights Reserved" by default and I assume data is similar.
How do you know you can trust the data? One reason you cite the owner or original creator of data is to assert that it is reliable. If the data you're using is not from the source, you'll also want to cite where you obtained it and hope that it's a trustworthy source.