Outline

Google Doc

• Nic Weber 18:03, 29 July 2010 (EDT): Started a rough draft of a paper for Data Science Journal. It's worth having a look at their statement to authors here

Abstract

• Data Science Journal requires 100 word max abstracts (although every article I've read is over that limit) below is my first crack, minus the findings (which might be helpful :) :

The sharing of primary data is crucial to building a sustainable infrastructure for the increasingly collaborative research efforts of the environmental sciences. As both the volume of data and the number of research projects being conducted in this field has increased, there has been little development in stakeholder policy to encourage primary data resources to be widely shared. Here, we present a quantitative analysis of the data sharing and citation policies of three journal subject categories: Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and EnvironmentalSciences. Our analysis shows that while a majority of these journals have no data sharing or policies ............... These results highlight the value of journals adopting data sharing and citation policies, and points to the need for this domain to more widely develop such policies.

Introduction

ditto from above:

The ability to both replicate and verify the findings of any given study is central to sound scientific practices. Beyond validation, the sharing of primary data is a practice with the potential to greatly expedite collaborations, catalyze related investigations and bring wider recognition to those that conducted the experiment (quote from jisc study) . Data sharing can, and often does take place informally amongst researchers (data sharing practices study) related by proximity or expertise. However, informal methods are highly unreliable (proof?) for most domains and privilege interpersonal relationships of scientists rather than domain competency. Previous studies have shown journal policy to be an effective motivator data sharing and citations practices in natural sciences. Recently this field has seen editorial policies (whitlock et al 2010), concerted technological efforts (Constable et al 2010) and large grant awards for building sustainable infrastructure (Michener ) all emphasizing the need to improve collaborative research efforts. In other fields, detailed sharing of data has proven to be related to increased ciation rates (piwowar 2009)

Methods

• Describe how journal info gathered.
  • Where the data came from: ISI Categories gave us initial journal titles, bibliometric data, expande to publication websites "author guiddlines" and scope notes.
  • Why technique was developed.
• What stats we ran, what our variables were (our dependant and independent)
  • Why requests / required
  • If needed, a description of Impact Factor:

Italic textThe journal impact factor describes the mean citation rate of articles published in a given journal [25] and is calculated by dividing the number of citations received in the current year (e.g. 2003) for articles published in the journal in the previous two years (i.e. 2002 and 2001) by the total number of articles published in the journal in those previous two years (ISI Journal Citation Reports ; http://isi10.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi/wos).

• • How we handled publisher
• Limitations: not privy to referee guidelines, limited to what was on websites / explicit in guidelines , etc

Results

• Interpretation of the statistics, place to display plots / graphs / data viz / tables