Cross-sectional audit reveals low data-sharing compliance among social science authors, highlighting a persistent gap between open-science policies and actual practice.
Key Points
To evaluate compliance rates with research data-sharing requests among empirical study authors across diverse social science disciplines.
Contacted 400 empirical study authors from 400 Q1 Scopus-indexed journals across eight social science disciplines.
Sampled authors who stated that data would be made available upon request or who had not explicitly refused data sharing.
Only 67 authors responded to the inquiry, with 15 (4%) ultimately providing their research data.
Fifty-two responding authors declined to provide data due to privacy and ethical concerns, yielding an overall compliance rate of 4% compared to the 12% benchmark reported in the medical sciences.