Data in Brief: Can a mega-journal for data be useful?

Abstract

As part of the current move towards open science, there is increasing pressure for scientists to share their research data. In support of this, several journals only publish descriptions of data generated from research: data papers. It is not clear whether this service encourages data reuse, however. This article assesses the prevalence and impact of the largest such journal, Data in Brief, comparing it with 24 other general or specialist data journals. The results show that Data in Brief became the largest data journal in 2016 and that its papers attracted over five Mendeley readers each, within a year of publication, as well as a nontrivial amount of citations. Its papers have been cited for relevance or facts contained in them in addition to acknowledging the reuse of associated datasets in about 1% of cases. Some papers describe electronic dataset whereas other papers embedded the tables or images that formed the shared data. Overall, the journal seems to make a positive contribution to science by enabling access to multiple types of data, even though its papers rarely lead to data reuse.

Online Data Articles: The Language of Intersubjective Stance in a Rhetorical Hybrid

“…While this genre set may be very convenient to authors “to convert supplementary data (or a part of it) into an additional journal publication” (Shaklee, 2014), as the Data in Brief editor remarks, authors may intend to make their data article appealing so that other scientists reuse the data and cite the article. Thelwall (2020, p. 697) notes that although data articles are in part a response to the pressure to make data available to others, they “rarely lead to data reuse.” Rather, they increase the visibility and citational impact of its associated research.…”

“…The second is to make visible the researchers’ efforts and time spent in collecting and analyzing research data. Thelwall (2020) also stresses a further function of data articles—they are citable, they comply with quality standards in scholarly publications (peer review processes) and, thus, they are “trustable” science.…”

Future of Scholarly Publishing: A Perspective

“…In the context of Open Science, Open Data take on a central role in scientific research, since they are one of its basic components (18). This concern to make research data public by institutions and researchers materializes what is the basis of an Open Science characterized by good and reliable practices (60). Raffaghelli and Manca (59) stated that "The common factor underlying these new practices [...] is mostly a social form of knowledge sharing and construction" (p. 1), in what Wilkinson et al (61) called FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability).…”

Data Paper as a Reward? Motivation, Consideration, and Perspective behind Data Paper Submission

“…The overall number of published data papers has exceeded more than ten thousand, and is still growing over the past few years, with some universities and active researchers viewing data paper submission as a normality of data publication (Schöpfel, Farace, Prost, & Zane, 2019; Thelwall, 2020). Despite the fact that data papers are bringing data into the mainstream of scholarly communication with increasing frequency, research indicates that the citation and re‐usage of data are lower than expected (Stuart, 2017; Thelwall, 2020), implying there might be other unknown drivers behind the increasing quantity.…”