Abstract
Numerous studies have demonstrated low but increasing rates of data and code sharing within medical and health research disciplines. However, it remains unclear how commonly data and code are shared across all fields of medical and health research, as well as whether sharing rates are positively associated with implementation of progressive policies by publishers and funders, or growing expectations from the medical and health research community at large. Therefore this systematic review aims to synthesise the findings of medical and health science studies that have empirically investigated the prevalence of data or code sharing, or both. Objectives include the investigation of: (i) the prevalence of public sharing of research data and code alongside published articles (including preprints), (ii) the prevalence of private sharing of research data and code in response to reasonable requests, and (iii) factors associated with the sharing of either research output (e.g., the year published, the publisher’s policy on sharing, the presence of a data or code availability statement). It is hoped that the results will provide some insight into how often research data and code are shared publicly and privately, how this has changed over time, and how effective some measures such as the institution of data sharing policies and data availability statements have been in motivating researchers to share their underlying data and code.
Highlights
Over the last two decades there has been growing calls on the scientific community to improve the transparency of many elements of the scholarly research lifecycle
Our study will use available individual participant data (IPD) to investigate several aspects of data and code sharing that have not yet been well-explored, such as how sharing rates have changed over time, as well as what influence other relevant factors such as data and code availability statements and publishers’ and funders’ sharing policies have had on motivating medical and health researchers to share their data and code
There is growing momentum among funders, publishers and the greater scientific community to increase the availability of the outputs of medical and health research
Summary
Over the last two decades there has been growing calls on the scientific community to improve the transparency of many elements of the scholarly research lifecycle. From one perspective greater availability of research data and code is considered a desirable goal as it allows for independent verification of findings, greater detection of errors, and is associated with increased scholarly impact metrics.[2,3,4] Sharing data facilitates more efficient and comprehensive aggregation of existing research findings, testing of secondary hypotheses not considered by the original authors, as well as evaluation of the robustness of chosen analytic strategies.[3,5,6] in contrast, other research points to many barriers to sharing data, such as: the navigation of participant privacy concerns, proprietary data and licensing terms, a lack of incentives to share, fears among researchers concerning loss of recognition and control over the research outputs (i.e., right to publish) and the misuse or misinterpretation of shared data, as well as the time and resource burdens associated with archiving data in a way that enables reuse.[7,8,9,10,11]
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