Scientific production on data repositories and open science published in the Web of Science database – Bibliometric conceptual analysis

Open Science emerged recently as a scientific production changing paradigm, relying on data repositories as part of the infrastructure for data sharing. This bibliometric study analyzed the scientific production on data repositories and Open Science indexed in the Web of Science database. Studies addressing data repositories and open science were searched in Web of Science in January 2024. The dataset was analyzed in Bibliometrix 4.0 for R with descriptive and network analyses of the conceptual structure. A 4% annual growth rate was found, with studies published mostly by China and USA. Open science emerged as a theme in 2016, reaching the highest frequency in 2019. Co-occurrence networks of Keywords Plus represented the scenario of infrastructure of data repositories from the genomics field, while author´s keywords revealed the scenario of open science. The thematic map showed data repositories and related aspects as basic themes, while biological data deposited in the repositories constituted the motor themes. Principles related to data sharing showed up more intensely in the 2021-2024 timespan. In conclusion, the publication profile confirmed Open Science as a relatively recent field of study, emerging within the last decade as a publication trend. Data repositories, its infrastructure and data itself have been associated to the biological, genomic and biomedical fields, with the types of repositories being the driving themes of the studies. There seems to exist plenty of room to explore and add elements of information science, such as ontologies, taxonomy and metadata to the existing literature.