A Study of Quantitative Data Reuse in the Social Sciences – the Case of the TSSCI Journal Articles, 2011-2015
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Lai, Ching-Yi
Abstract
With the increasing calls for data sharing, governments, academic institutions and journal publishers have mandated or encouraged scholars to share their research data. Data sharing is a complicated issue involving technical and social rearrangement. There are also calls for empirical examination of research data reuse activities to evaluate the outcome and benefit of data sharing. This study examined the state of data reuse in the Taiwan social sciences journals as well as the data reuse behavior of social sciences scholars. This study employed a content-analysis approach to analyze journal articles indexed in TSSCI. Five TSSCI domains were chosen for the analysis, including sociology, political sciences, education, economics and psychology. Journal articles from 2011 to 2015 were used as the sample for this study. The analyses focused on: (1) the characteristic of the data reuse papers, i.e., proportions of data reuse papers, publishing year, amount of datasets used in each reuse paper, and data-reporting state of paper; (2) the characteristic of the reused data, i.e., the subject distribution of datasets, subject distribution of variables, origination of data, types of data, and year gap between reuse papers and used data. It also used semi-structured in-depth interviews to examine 14 social scientists’ data reuse behavior. The interviews focused on (1) the reason for data reusing; (2) channels for data seeking and discovery; (3) principles governing assessment of the found data; and (4) the preparation treatment of the data prior to its reuse. Based on the analysis, this study found 511 reuse papers published in the said period (17.33% of the total empirical papers), most of which used one dataset. Almost half of the economics papers had used two or more datasets, making it distinct from other social sciences domains. Less than half of the papers had reported data in abstracts, tables, acknowledgements and references. However, most of reuse papers had provided sufficient identification information for the data, e.g., titles, collectors, and year of data. This study also identified 875 reused datasets. It was found that half of the datasets were in economics, political sciences and education. As to the variables used in the reuse papers, sociology, political sciences and education papers tended to use variables related to social characteristics, e.g., race, salary, and gender. On the contrary, economics papers had tended to use macro-level variables relating to country or institutional phenomenon. 46.86% of the reused datasets were originated from governments, followed by academic institutions (23.77%) and corporations (21.14%). Less than 6% of the datasets were from previous individual research. More than half of the datasets were business-transaction data, followed by series surveys (34.63%) and one-time study (8.34%). The year gap between reuse papers and datasets were relatively long in economics and sociology, but shorter in political sciences and education. The interviews revealed that scholars were motivated to reuse data mainly because of the barrier to collect data on their own, good credibility of existing data, ability to extend existing research, explore potential research questions, and the influences of subject disciplines. Scholars sought data through journal articles, colleagues and advisors, websites of government agencies and academic institutions, the promotion of academic institutes and hard copy statistics data. Prior to data use, a researcher would assess the usability and quality of the data, including the collection processes, representativeness of samples, timeliness and accessibility of data. Prior to data reanalysis, researchers may also observe the descriptive statistics of the datasets and conduct the necessary data cleaning and re-processing activities.
Subjects
Social Sciences
Quantitative Data
Data Reuse
Data Citation
Data Seeking Behavior
Type
thesis
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