Abstract
Background
Sharing research data provides benefit to the general scientific community, but the benefit is less obvious for the investigator who makes his or her data available.
Principal Findings
We examined the citation history of 85 cancer microarray clinical trial publications with respect to the availability of their data. The 48% of trials with publicly available microarray data received 85% of the aggregate citations. Publicly available data was significantly (p = 0.006) associated with a 69% increase in citations, independently of journal impact factor, date of publication, and author country of origin using linear regression.
Significance
This correlation between publicly available data and increased literature impact may further motivate investigators to share their detailed research data.
Introduction
Sharing information facilitates science. Publicly sharing detailed research data–sample attributes, clinical factors, patient outcomes, DNA sequences, raw mRNA microarray measurements–with other researchers allows these valuable resources to contribute far beyond their original analysis[1]. In addition to being used to confirm original results, raw data can be used to explore related or new hypotheses, particularly when combined with other publicly available data sets. Real data is indispensable when investigating and developing study methods, analysis techniques, and software implementations. The larger scientific community also benefits: sharing data encourages multiple perspectives, helps to identify errors, discourages fraud, is useful for training new researchers, and increases efficient use of funding and patient population resources by avoiding duplicate data collection.
To read the rest of the article go to http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000308
No comments:
Post a Comment