Disciplinary differences in faculty research data management practices and perspectives

Abstract

Academic librarians are increasingly engaging in data curation by providing infrastructure (e.g., institutional repositories) and offering services (e.g., data management plan consultations) to support the management of research data on their campuses. Efforts to develop these resources may benefit from a greater understanding of disciplinary differences in research data management needs. After conducting a survey of data management practices and perspectives at our research university, we categorized faculty members into four research domains—arts and humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, and basic sciences—and analyzed variations in their patterns of survey responses. We found statistically significant differences among the four research domains for nearly every survey item, revealing important disciplinary distinctions in data management actions, attitudes, and interest in support services. Serious consideration of both the similarities and dissimilarities among disciplines will help guide academic librarians and other data curation professionals in developing a range of data-management services that can be tailored to the unique needs of different scholarly researchers.

Assessing Research Data Management Practices of Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University

“…Many interviewees expressed concern over lack of time and resources for preparing data for sharing, a pattern seen elsewhere in the literature (e.g. McLure et al 2014, Doty 2012, Akers & Doty 2013. Cragin et al (2010) also found that researcher attitudes towards research data sharing were colored by the amount of time it would take to prepare data for sharing.…”

“…Almost without exception, survey and interview research exploring data management and sharing practices in academia exhibit striking homogeneity including: a general lack of data sharing through repositories and journals in favor of sharing via personal communication, researchers rarely creating metadata or other documentation for data, backup and storage practices that are of questionable efficacy and on questionable media, and concerns among researchers about the amount of time required to prepare data for sharing and the potential for misuse of data (Akers & Doty, 2013;Doty, 2012;Editorial, 2011;Parham, Bodnar, & Fuchs 2012;Steinhart, Chen, Arguillas, Dietrich, & Kramer, 2012;Cragin, Palmer, Carlson, & Witt, 2010;Peters & Dryden, 2011). On the other hand, the literature is similarly replete with survey and interview results suggesting that researchers are interested in training and guidance for research data management best practices (Akers & Doty, 2013;Parham et al, 2012;McClure, Level, Cranston, Oehlerts, & Culbertson, 2014, Wright et al, 2013.…”

“…Many researchers have used institution-wide faculty/researcher surveys to gather information about research data management practices at their institutions (e.g. Akers & Doty, 2013;Beagrie et al, 2009;Henty et al, 2008;Parham et al, 2012;Whitmire et al, in press) while other survey projects have focused on specific sub-groups within the university such as NSF awardees (Steinhart et al, 2012), STEM faculty (D'Ignazio & Qin, 2008, or at a teaching college (Scaramozzino, Ramirez, McGaughey, Ramírez, & McGaughey, 2012). An alternative set of approaches favor in-depth interviews or focus group with researchers such as those conducted through the Data Curation Profiles Toolkit (datacurationprofiles.…”

How are we Measuring Up? Evaluating Research Data Services in Academic Libraries

“…Using a common set of questions enabled us to compare the data formats used by faculty at VCU to those used by faculty at Northwestern (Buys & Shaw, 2015, Figures 1 and 2). Similarly, we reused the reasons for not sharing data from a survey at the NIH Library by Federer, Lu, and Joubert (2015); the questions pertaining to storage amounts, data storage, and backup meth-ods came from Akers and Doty (2013) at Emory University. By making surveys comparable to others, it becomes possible to perform a meta-analysis of institutional surveys to provide deeper insight into the data behaviors of researchers.…”

Research Data Management Among Life Sciences Faculty: Implications for Library Service

“…However, inconsistencies extend further than a definition of terms. Previous studies evidence wide variation in practices surrounding research data: differences in how data are collected, stored, and shared (Bishoff & Johnston, 2015;Kennan & Markauskaite, 2015;Tenopir et al, 2011Tenopir et al, , 2015; among disciplines, institutions, departments, and individuals (Akers & Doty, 2013;Buys & Shaw, 2015;Weller & Monroe-Gulick, 2014); and in researchers' experience, knowledge, and perceptions (Akers & Doty, 2012;Jahnke & Asher, 2012;Scaramozzino, Ramírez, & McGaughey, 2012). When viewed collectively, it is evident that librarians must recognize and address those needs that are relevant to their specific users.…”