Data sharing practices across knowledge domains: A dynamic examination of data availability statements in PLOS ONE publications

Journal of Information Science, vol. 50, pp. 673–689

Abstract

As the importance of research data gradually grows in sciences, data sharing has come to be encouraged and even mandated by journals and funders in recent years. Following this trend, the data availability statement has been increasingly embraced by academic communities as a means of sharing research data as part of research articles. This article presents a quantitative study of which mechanisms and repositories are used to share research data in PLOS ONE articles. We offer a dynamic examination of this topic from the disciplinary and temporal perspectives based on all statements in English-language research articles published between 2014 and 2020 in the journal. We find a slow yet steady growth in the use of data repositories to share data over time, as opposed to sharing data in the article and/or supplementary materials; this indicates improved compliance with the journal’s data sharing policies. We also find that multidisciplinary data repositories have been increasingly used over time, whereas some disciplinary repositories show a decreasing trend. Our findings can help academic publishers and funders to improve their data sharing policies and serve as an important baseline dataset for future studies on data sharing activities.

Authors 3

1. Chenyue Jiao

   University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

   Affiliation as printed

   School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

2. Kai Li corresponding

   Renmin University of China

   Affiliation as printed

   School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China, China

3. Zhichao Fang Aachen Centre for Science and Technology Studies

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, The Netherlands