Replication data for: An Analysis of Data Availability Statements in Qualitative Research Journal Articles

Summary Over the past decade, many scholarly journals have adopted policies on data sharing, with an increasing number of journals requiring that authors share the data underlying their published work. Frequently, qualitative data are excluded from those policies explicitly or implicitly. A few journals, however, intentionally do not make such a distinction. This project focuses on articles published in eight of the open-access journals maintained by Public Library of Science (PLOS). All PLOS journals introduced strict data sharing guidelines in 2014, applying to all empirical data on the basis of which articles are published. We collected a database of more than 2,300 articles containing a qualitative data component published between January 1, 2015 and August 23, 2023 and analyzed the data availability statements (DAS) researchers made regarding the availability, or lack thereof, of their data. We describe the degree to which and manner in which data are reportedly available (for example, in repositories, via institutional gate-keepers, or on request from author) versus those that are declared to be unavailable We also outline several dimensions of patterned variation in the data availability statements, including describe temporal patterns and variation by data type. Based on the results, we also provide recommendations to both researchers on how to make their data availability statements clearer, more transparent and more informative, and to journal editors and reviewers, on how to interpret and evaluate statements to ensure they accurately reflect a given data availability scenario. Finally, we suggest a workflow which can link interactions with repositories most productively as part of a typical editorial process.
Data Overview This data deposit includes data and code to assemble the dataset, generate all figures and values used in the paper and appendix, and generate the codebook. It also includes the codebook and the figures. The analysis.R script and the data in data/analysis are sufficient to reproduce all findings in the paper. The additional scripts and the data files in data/raw are included for full transparency and to facilitate the detection of any errors in the data processing pipeline. Their structure is due to the development of the project over time.