Abstract
Academic librarians are increasingly engaging in data curation by providing infrastructure (e.g., institutional repositories) and offering services (e.g., data management plan consultations) to support the management of research data on their campuses. Efforts to develop these resources may benefit from a greater understanding of disciplinary differences in research data management needs. After conducting a survey of data management practices and perspectives at our research university, we categorized faculty members into four research domains—arts and humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, and basic sciences—and analyzed variations in their patterns of survey responses. We found statistically significant differences among the four research domains for nearly every survey item, revealing important disciplinary distinctions in data management actions, attitudes, and interest in support services. Serious consideration of both the similarities and dissimilarities among disciplines will help guide academic librarians and other data curation professionals in developing a range of data-management services that can be tailored to the unique needs of different scholarly researchers.
Highlights
Research data need not merely serve as material underlying conference papers, journal articles, and books
Academic librarians are increasingly becoming engaged in data curation by providing infrastructure and developing services to support the management of research data on their campuses (ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee, 2012; Heidorn, 2011; Monastersky, 2013; Olendorf & Koch, 2012; Reznik-Zellen, Adamick and McGinty, 2012; Soehner, Steeves and Ward, 2010; Starr, Willett, Federer, Horning and Bergstrom, 2012; Tenopir, Birch and Allard, 2012)
Do researchers in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences create datasets that differ in size and content, they are enmeshed in diverse research cultures and communities of interest with different attitudes toward and expectancies for data sharing and archiving (Digital Curation Centre, 2012; Borgman, 2012; Palmer and Cragin, 2008)
Summary
Research data need not merely serve as material underlying conference papers, journal articles, and books. The data management needs of researchers vary substantially across disciplines. Do researchers in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences create datasets that differ in size and content, they are enmeshed in diverse research cultures and communities of interest with different attitudes toward and expectancies for data sharing and archiving (Digital Curation Centre, 2012; Borgman, 2012; Palmer and Cragin, 2008). Requires an understanding of these disciplinary distinctions and the development of services that are tailored to different populations of academic researchers (Cragin, Palmer, Carlson and Witt, 2010)
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