Data for "Researchers and their data. A study based on the use of the word data in scholarly articles"

<em>Data</em> is one of the most used terms in scientific vocabulary. This article focusses on the relationship between data and research by analyzing the contexts of occurrence of the word <em>data</em> in a corpus of 72,471 research articles (1980-2012) from two distinct fields (Social sciences, Physical sciences). The aim is to shed light on the issues raised by research on data, namely the difficulty of defining what is considered as data, the transformations that data undergo during the research process and how they gain value for researchers who hold them. Relying on the distribution of occurrences throughout the texts and over time, it demonstrates that the word <em>data </em>mostly occurs at the beginning and at the end of research articles. Adjectives and verbs accompanying the noun <em>data</em> turn out to be even more important than <em>data</em> itself in specifying data. The increase in the use of possessive pronouns at the end of the articles reveals that authors tend to claim ownership of their data at the very end of the research process. Our research demonstrates that even if data handling operations are increasingly frequent, they are still described with imprecise verbs that do not reflect the complexity of these transformations.数据（data）是科学术语中使用最为广泛的词汇之一。本文聚焦数据与科研的关联，通过分析来自社会科学、自然科学两个不同学科领域、由72471篇1980年至2012年的科研论文组成的语料库中“数据”一词的出现语境展开研究。本研究旨在阐明数据相关科研所引发的诸多议题：即界定何为数据的难点、科研过程中数据所经历的形态转变，以及数据如何为其持有者（研究者）创造研究价值。基于词频在文本内部与时间维度上的分布特征，本研究发现“数据”一词主要出现在科研论文的开篇与结尾部分。在界定数据的内涵时，与“数据”搭配的形容词与动词，其作用甚至比“数据”本身更为关键。论文结尾处物主代词使用频次的提升，反映出研究者往往会在科研流程的最终环节主张对其数据的所有权。本研究还证实：尽管数据处理操作的应用愈发频繁，但相关描述仍使用了不够精准的动词，未能体现这些数据转变过程的复杂性。