The Field-Specificity of Data Practices and the Public Sharing of Research Data (Part 1): Evidence from a Survey of Researchers at German Universities

Abstract

Increasingly, researchers who receive public funding for their research are expected to make their research data publicly available. However, research fields differ in their epistemic practices and norms for publicly sharing research data. The strong variation by field is confirmed by our analysis of data from the DZHW Science Survey of 8,822 researchers at German Universities. Comparing 39 subfields across a wide range of disciplines we find substantial variation in the role of data for research, in the dependency of researchers on self-produced data versus third-party data, and the public sharing of research data. This includes variation within disciplines that is concealed when only a coarse field classification is used. We further examine statistical evidence for a link between data reuse and data sharing that was proposed by Khan et al. (2023). We find only limited support for such a link and rather support for the hypothesis that data sharing and data reuse behaviors are not causally linked, but instead reflections of shared epistemic practices, as suggested by Curty et al. (2017). From a science policy perspective our findings confirm the need for field-specific approaches to support the public sharing and the re-use of research data.