Data policies of highly-ranked social science journals

By encouraging and requiring that authors share their data in order to publish articles, scholarly journals have become an important actor in the movement to improve the openness of data and the reproducibility of research. But how many social science journals encourage or mandate that authors share the data supporting their research findings? How does the share of journal data policies vary by discipline? What influences these journals’ decisions to adopt such policies and instructions? And what do those policies and instructions look like?

We discuss the results of our analysis of the instructions and policies of 291 highly-ranked journals publishing social science research, where we studied the contents of journal data policies and instructions across 14 variables, such as when and how authors are asked to share their data, and what role journal ranking and age play in the existence and quality of data policies and instructions. We also compare our results to the results of other studies that have analyzed the policies of social science journals, although differences in the journals chosen and how each study defines what constitutes a data policy limit this comparison.
We conclude that a little more than half of the journals in our study have data policies. A greater share of the economics journals have data policies and mandate sharing, followed by political science/international relations and psychology journals.

Finally, we use our findings to make several recommendations: Policies should include the terms “data,” “dataset” or more specific terms that make it clear what to make available; policies should include the benefits of data sharing; journals, publishers, and associations need to collaborate more to clarify data policies; and policies should explicitly ask for qualitative data.

通过鼓励和强制要求作者在发表文章时共享其数据，学术期刊已成为推动数据开放性和研究可重复性运动中的关键参与者。然而，究竟有多少社会科学期刊鼓励或强制作者分享其研究发现的支撑数据？期刊数据政策的比例在各个学科中如何变化？是什么影响了这些期刊采纳此类政策和指导方针的决定？以及，这些政策和指导方针具体呈现为何种形态？本研究探讨了291份高排名社会科学研究期刊的指令和政策，我们分析了期刊数据政策和指导方针的14个变量，如作者何时以及如何被要求分享数据，以及期刊排名和年龄在数据政策和指导方针的存在和质量中扮演的角色。我们还比较了我们的结果与其他分析社会科学期刊政策的研究结果，尽管期刊选择的差异以及每项研究对构成数据政策的定义的不同限制了这种比较。我们得出结论，超过一半的期刊拥有数据政策。经济学期刊拥有数据政策并强制分享的比例更高，其次是政治学/国际关系和心理学期刊。最后，我们利用我们的发现提出了几点建议：政策应包含“数据”、“数据集”或更具体的术语，以明确说明应提供的内容；政策应包括数据共享的益处；期刊、出版商和协会需要更紧密合作以阐明数据政策；政策应明确要求提供定性数据。