Abstract
A study of 100 papers from five journals that make use of bioacoustic recordings shows that only a minority (21%) deposit any of the recordings in a repository, supplementary materials section or a personal website. This lack of deposition hinders re-use of the raw data by other researchers, prevents the reproduction of a project's analyses and confirmation of its findings and impedes progress within the broader bioacoustics community. We make some recommendations for researchers interested in depositing their data.
Highlights
The importance of sharing the datasets used in biological research has been discussed recently by a number of authors, for example, in ecology (e.g. Poisot et al 2013, Kenall et al 2014), phylogenetics (e.g. Magee et al 2014, Stoltzfus et al 2012) and behaviour (e.g. Caetano and Aisenberg 2014)
Out of all the articles in the study, 79% did not deposit any sound recordings, 12% deposited a sample of the studied data and only 9% deposited the full acoustic dataset (Fig. 1)
Given widespread lack of deposition described in this paper, below we provide some recommendations which researchers may use to improve the accessibility of their bioacoustic data
Summary
The importance of sharing the datasets used in biological research has been discussed recently by a number of authors, for example, in ecology (e.g. Poisot et al 2013, Kenall et al 2014), phylogenetics (e.g. Magee et al 2014, Stoltzfus et al 2012) and behaviour (e.g. Caetano and Aisenberg 2014). Caetano and Aisenberg 2014) These authors list several benefits of sharing data, Baker E, Vincent S including the opportunity to create future collaborations and clarification of authorship. There can be ethical considerations, including the use of public funds to generate these datasets Another significant reason for sharing datasets underpinning research is to ensure that those findings are reproducible, a fact which advocates for open science have discussed well before the recent 'reproducibility crisis' in psychology (Open Science Collaboration 2015). The datasets used in bioacoustic research vary in scale from a single short recording to continuous recordings at a site over several years. These recordings may be used to identify Recordings may be used to design automated surveys that do not themselves make recordings (e.g. Bennett et al 2015)
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