Data Management and Sharing: Practices and Perceptions of Psychology Researchers

Abstract

Research data is increasingly viewed as an important scholarly output. While a growing body of studies have investigated researcher practices and perceptions related to data sharing, information about data-related practices throughout the research process (including data collection and analysis) remains largely anecdotal. Building on our previous study of data practices in neuroimaging research, we conducted a survey of data management practices in the field of psychology. Our survey included questions about the type(s) of data collected, the tools used for data analysis, practices related to data organization, maintaining documentation, backup procedures, and long-term archiving of research materials. Our results demonstrate the complexity of managing and sharing data in psychology. Data is collected in multifarious forms from human participants, analyzed using a range of software tools, and archived in formats that may become obsolete. As individuals, our participants demonstrated relatively good data management practices, however they also indicated that there was little standardization within their research group. Participants generally indicated that they were willing to change their current practices in light of new technologies, opportunities, or requirements.

Analytic reproducibility in articles receiving open data badges at the journal Psychological Science : an observational study

“…Open Sci. 8: 201494 room for improvement in the data management and analysis practices adopted by psychology researchers [25]. Continued development of user-friendly tools that facilitate reproducibility and dedicated reproducibility training may help to reduce this burden.…”

“…[ 24 ]). It should be noted that ensuring the reproducibility of a scientific manuscript requires a non-trivial time investment and presently, there is room for improvement in the data management and analysis practices adopted by psychology researchers [ 25 ]. Continued development of user-friendly tools that facilitate reproducibility and dedicated reproducibility training may help to reduce this burden.…”

Data management and sharing: Practices and perceptions of psychology researchers

“…The survey instrument, dataset, and Jupyter notebooks containing the code used for data analysis are openly available on the Dryad data repository [ 39 ]. Data were analyzed using the SciPy [ 40 ], NumPy [ 41 ], and Pandas [ 42 ] packages.…”

A study of the determinants of psychologists' data sharing and open data badge adoption

“…Furthermore, with regard to public data‐sharing, Houtkoop et al (2018) found that depositing data in online repositories is uncommon in psychology; only less than 10% of respondents had shared their research data through data repositories. Another recent study by Borghi and Van Gulick (2020) also reported that only 23 out of 274 psychologists (8.4%) actually publish a dataset through data repositories—those rates are very similar to the current adoption rate of open data badges (i.e., 7.1%) in 14 APA journals in 2020. For this reason, only 13.6% of psychologists had experience in using other researchers' data (Tenopir et al, 2020).…”

“…This research provides several practical implications for the psychology research community about how to promote open data badge adoption as well as increase voluntary data sharing (Borghi & Van Gulick, 2020; Houtkoop et al, 2018). The results of this research suggest that psychologists' data sharing and open data badge adoption intentions are influenced by similar and different factors, so similar and different strategies are required to encourage psychologists' open data badge adoption and voluntary data sharing.…”