Datasets in ecology articles: A preliminary survey of availability, citation and repositories

Background/Question/Methods

Datasets are increasingly expected to be made available coincident with the publication of research articles.  Many funding agencies, as well as journal publishers, now require that. Datasets, when openly available, can be used to enhance understanding of previously reported research results and can be used for further analyses and new research. To what extent are researchers making their data openly available to readers of articles in the top peer-reviewed journals in ecology? How frequently do researchers provide formal and complete citations to the datasets used for, or generated from, their analyses? Has this frequency increased over the last few years as expected? What repositories are typically used for storing ecology datasets? The top journals for ecology were identified by impact factor using Thomson Journal Citation Reports as well as by Eigenfactor. Articles from these top journals were randomly selected over the last five years (2010 – 2014). Selected articles were keyword searched for: dataset or datasets or data set or datasets. Any mention of a specific dataset was reviewed for parenthetical and bibliographic citation in the article. And the repository location of cited datasets was recorded and the number of citations to specific repositories was tabulated.

Results/Conclusions

This preliminary survey indicates that most researchers, except when publishing articles in journals for specific publishers, are not making their datasets easily available to readers of ecology research articles. Datasets are often mentioned in journal articles without a formal and complete citation to them. Surprisingly, this pattern has not changed much over the last few years. The use of repositories, identified in articles, for ecology datasets does not appear widespread except for publisher sites associated with particular journals.