This application brings together a team of researchers from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan in response to RFA-NR-07-001, """"""""Research on Research Integrity."""""""" This project will address the extent of research data sharing in the social sciences and assess whether research data sharing is related to other aspects of the scientific process including data use and scientific publication. This project will focus on the more than 6,000 National Institutes of Health awards and 3,000 National Science Foundation awards dating from the mid 1970s in a current database at ICPSR (known as the LEADS Database). The research proposed here will allow us to assess the impact of these NIH and NSF grants on scientific research by examining the extent to which they have been made available for secondary analysis and whether this data availability has enhanced scientific productivity through the research literature. To accomplish our goal we will enhance the existing database by conducting additional abstract and archiving searches, validating our screening procedures, and adding a wide range of analytic measures. We will also conduct a survey of primary investigators to assess the extent of informal methods of data sharing that cannot be captured by our archival search methods. With these data we will describe the extent to which research data are shared with the larger scientific community and explore the determinants of data sharing among recipients of federal grants who use the funds to collect primary data in the social sciences. Finally, we will evaluate whether public data sharing enhances research productivity and scientific output by using scientific publications and citation practices as measures of productivity. Creating a comprehensive database to understand the causes and consequences of data sharing is an important intellectual activity with implications for the social science research community and other research communities as well. The existing LEADS database benefited from investments by several funded projects at ICPSR and has developed into a diverse and rich resource for exploring the extent to which important research data may be underutilized and not preserved for future use. ? ? ?
