Initial insight into three modes of data sharing: Prevalence of primary reuse, data integration and dataset release in research articles

While data sharing has received research interest in recent times, its real status remains unclear, owing to its ambiguous concept. To understand the current status of data sharing, this study examined primary reuse, data integration, and dataset release as the actual practices of data sharing. A total of 963 articles, chosen from those published in 2018 and registered in the Web of Science global citation database, were manually checked. Existing data were reused in the mode of data integration (13.3%) as frequently as they were for the mode of primary reuse (12.1%). Dataset release was the least common mode (9.0%). The results show the variation in data sharing and indicate the need for standardization of data description in articles based on thorough registration and expansion in public data archives to close the loop that results in the virtuous cycle of research data.