An examination of data reuse practices within highly cited articles of faculty at a research university

Data sharing and reuse are regarded as important components of the research workflow and key elements in open science. While reuse is well-documented in some circumstances, the utility of data sharing for all domains is less clear, and limited evidence of wide-spread demand can make it challenging to justify effort and funds required to format, document, share, and preserve data. This paper describes a project that: (1) surveyed authors of highly cited papers published in 2015 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in nine STEM disciplines to determine if data were generated for their article and their knowledge of reuse by other researchers, and (2) surveyed authors who cited these 2015 articles to ascertain whether they reused data from the original article and how that data was obtained. The project goal was to better understand data reuse in practice and to explore if research data from an initial publication was reused in subsequent publications. While the results revealed reuse in many situations (and deemed important in these cases), the survey results and researcher supplied comments also indicated that data does not play the same role in all studies or even in studies that build on previous ones.