Impact of Social Sciences – Global-level data sets may be more highly cited than most journal articles.

As with so many things, scientific research has been transformed by the rise of big data. These days, scientific discoveries happen through computer screens at least as often as they do through microscopes. In fact, many of the most significant recent discoveries like climate change and the Higgs boson were only possible because of big data. As a result, there’s been a lot of talk in the scientific community about how to deal with all of this data. Many in the community have been pushing to make that data openly accessible to everyone. They argue that sharing data is necessary to replicate and verify published research, to allow others in the community to more easily benefit from and build on others’ research, and to foster a culture of openness and transparency in science. But despite these arguments, scientists have, for the most part, been reluctant to share their data.  Part of the problem is that researchers are not usually taught how to describe and format their data sets in ways that make them usable by others. But more fundamentally, scientists are reluctant to share their data because they are worried about not receiving credit for it. With the rise of publication-based assessments like the RAE, scientists have come under increasing pressure to publish journal articles with their data to advance in their careers. Sharing their data with the world not only increases the risk that others might benefit from that data without crediting them for collecting it, but also takes time and energy away from their production of new journal articles. So, to try and persuade scientists to share their data, and to give credit to those scientists who are already doing so, I attempted to measure the impact that a few openly accessible data sets have had on scientific research. In my recent paper in Plos One, I analyzed the impact that three freely available oceanographic data sets curated by the US National Oceanographic Data Center have had on oceanographic research by using citations as a measure of impact ... My results suggest that all three data sets are more highly cited than most journal articles. Each data set has probably been cited more often than 99% of the journal articles in oceanography that were published during the same years as the data sets. One data set in particular, the World Ocean Atlas and World Ocean Database, has been cited or referenced in over 8,500 journal articles since it was first released in 1982. To put that into perspective, this data set has a citation count over six times higher than any single journal article in oceanography from 1982 to the present ..."