The Journal Article as a Means to Share Data: a Content Analysis of Supplementary Materials from Two Disciplines

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The practice of publishing supplementary materials with journal articles is becoming increasingly prevalent across the sciences. We sought to understand better the content of these materials by investigating the differences between the supplementary materials published by authors in the geosciences and plant sciences. METHODS We conducted a random stratified sampling of four articles from each of 30 journals published in 2013. In total, we examined 297 supplementary data files for a range of different factors. RESULTS We identified many similarities between the practices of authors in the two fields, including the formats used (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs) and the small size of the files. There were differences identified in the content of the supplementary materials: the geology materials contained more maps and machine-readable data; the plant science materials included much more tabular data and multimedia content. DISCUSSION Our results suggest that the data shared through supplementary files in these fields may not lend itself to reuse. Code and related scripts are not often shared, nor is much ‘raw’ data. Instead, the files often contain summary data, modified for human reading and use. CONCLUSION Given these and other differences, our results suggest implications for publishers, librarians, and authors, and may require shifts in behavior if effective data sharing is to be realized.External Data or Supplements:Kenyon, Jeremy; Sprague, Nancy; Flathers, Edward, 2016, "Data from: The journal article as a means to share data: a content analysis of supplementary materials from two disciplines", http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DCSMGP, Harvard Dataverse.

Data Practices Ten Years Later: A New Review of Selected Publications by Crop Sciences Faculty

“…Scientists seem regularly to reuse data from PDF files despite limitations. Publications were typically in PDF format, and as found in this and other studies (Herold, 2015;Kenyon et al, 2016;Williams, 2012), supplementary materials were often PDF files. Studies have articulated concerns about PDF files limiting data reuse (Kenyon et al, 2016;Williams, 2016).…”

The types of research data receiving scholarly credit within and across the science, engineering, and mathematics fields

“…Nevertheless, while data sharing is the norm at least in astronomy, as is preservation (Ivezić 2012), surprisingly little citation was evident in astronomy/physics in the DCI. Also noteworthy in this regard is the finding reported in another study that the least data sharing in journal articles occurred in physics (Keynon et al 2016). In any case, the distribution of data types in astronomy/physics was quite skewed, with mass spectral data in particular accounting for more than 90% of the total, followed by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) results and spectral data.…”