Reuse of scientific data in academic publications

Purpose – In recent years, a large number of data repositories have been built and used. However, the extent to which scientific data are re-used in academic publications is still unknown. The purpose of this paper is to explore the functions of re-used scientific data in scholarly publication in different fields. Design/methodology/approach – To address these questions, the authors identified 827 publications citing resources in the Dryad Digital Repository indexed by Scopus from 2010 to 2015. Findings – The results show that: the number of citations to scientific data increases sharply over the years, but mainly from data-intensive disciplines, such as agricultural, biology science, environment science and medicine; the majority of citations are from the originating articles; and researchers tend to reuse data produced by their own research groups. Research limitations/implications – Dryad data may be re-used without being formally cited. Originality/value – The conservatism in data sharing suggests that more should be done to encourage researchers to re-use other’s data.