A Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Archaeological Data as an Incentive to Data Sharing

Abstract

How do archaeologists share their research data, if at all? We review what data are, according to current influential definitions, and previous work on the benefits, costs, and norms of data sharing in the sciences broadly. To understand data sharing in archaeology, we present the results of three pilot studies: requests for data by e-mail, review of data availability in published articles, and analysis of archaeological datasets deposited in repositories. We find that archaeologists are often willing to share but that discipline-wide sharing is patchy and ad hoc. Legislation and mandates are effective at increasing data sharing, but editorial policies at journals lack adequate enforcement. Although most of the data available at repositories are licensed to enable flexible reuse, only a small proportion of the data are stored in structured formats for easy reuse. We present some suggestions for improving the state of date sharing in archaeology; among these is a standard for citing datasets to ensure that researchers making their data publicly available receive appropriate credit.

Sowing the Seeds of Future Research: Data Sharing, Citation and Reuse in Archaeobotany

“…Archaeobotanical data falls within the category of observational data in archaeology (Marwick & Pilaar Birch 2018). Archaeobotanical data is considered as the quantitative assessment of plant macrofossils present within a sample from a discrete archaeological context, which can include species identification, plant part, levels of identification (cf.…”

“…ORA-Data), or social networking sites for academics (Academia.edu, ResearchGate). More widely in archaeology, some have observed that archaeological data is rarely published (Kintigh et al 2014), and recent reviews have reported low levels of data sharing (Huggett 2018;Marwick & Pilaar Birch 2018). A closely related issue is that of data reuse.…”

“…Responsible reuse of primary data encourages the sharing of primary data (Atici et al 2013), but levels of data reuse in archaeology are thought to remain low (Huggett 2018). Principles for responsible data citation in archaeology have recently been developed summarising how datasets should be cited (Marwick & Pilaar Birch 2018).…”

“…Questions of reproducibility have been raised in recent years in archaeology, with considerations of a range of practices which can improve the reproducibility of findings, and a recent call for the application of open science principles to archaeology ). Discussion has so far focussed on access to grey literature (Evans 2015), data sharing (Atici et al 2013), data citation practices (Marwick & Pilaar Birch 2018) and com-putational reproducibility , with a focus on lithics, zooarchaeological evidence, and archaeological site reports.…”

“…Much less focus has been paid to the data-sharing practices of individuals or small-groups of university-based researchers who may be disseminating their research largely through journal articles. Recent work on the availability of data on lithics assemblages found a low level of data sharing (Marwick & Pilaar Birch 2018) and there are perceptions of low levels of data reuse (Huggett 2018;Kintigh et al 2018). Within zooarchaeology numerous studies have explored issues of data sharing and reuse (Kansa & Kansa 2013, and the sub-discipline is seen as one of the most advanced areas of archaeology in regards to open science (Cooper & Green 2016: 273).…”