Data integration as the major mode of data reuse

Data sharing has been emphasized in scientific research in the era of open science; however, the concept of data sharing is ambiguous, and the real situation of data sharing is unclear. One reason is that most studies focused on researchers' recognition, motivation, and other contributing factors and did not thoroughly discuss the actual practice of data sharing for preparing research articles. To explicitly understand the current status of data sharing, the authors considered and investigated primary reuse, data integration, and data release distinctively as the actual practices of data sharing. A total of 237 articles published in 2018 and registered in the Web of Science global citation database were manually checked. Unlike the scarcity of data reuse (8.0%) or data release (5.1%), existing data were most frequently reused in the form of data integration (20.7%). The result implies that further studies on detailed data reuse are required to clarify the concept of data sharing.