Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how health scientists’ attitudinal, social, and resource factors affect their data reuse behaviors. Design/methodology/approach: A survey method was utilized to investigate to what extent attitudinal, social, and resource factors influence health scientists’ data reuse behaviors. The health scientists’ data reuse research model was validated by using partial least squares (PLS) based structural equation modeling technique with a total of 161 health scientists in the USA. Findings: The analysis results showed that health scientists’ data reuse intentions are driven by attitude toward data reuse, community norm of data reuse, disciplinary research climate, and organizational support factors. This research also found that both perceived usefulness of data reuse and perceived concern involved in data reuse have significant influences on health scientists’ attitude toward data reuse. Research limitations/implications: This research evaluated its newly proposed research model based on the theory of planned behavior using a sample from the community of scientists’ scholar database. This research showed an overall picture of how attitudinal, social, and resource factors influence health scientists’ data reuse behaviors. This research is limited due to its sample size and low response rate, so this study is considered as an exploratory study rather than a confirmatory study. Practical implications: This research suggested for health science research communities, academic institutions, and libraries that diverse strategies need to be utilized to promote health scientists’ data reuse behaviors. Originality/value: This research is one of initial studies in scientific data reuse which provided a holistic map about health scientists’ data sharing behaviors. The findings of this study provide the groundwork for strategies to facilitate data reuse practice in health science areas.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 389-407 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Aslib Journal of Information Management |
| Volume | 69 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2017, © Emerald Publishing Limited.
Funding
Finally, the only measure that is not supported by our study data is the impact of the data repository. In health science, clinical data repositories have just begun to play a role in promoting data sharing and reuse practice. As mentioned earlier, genomics, one of the more data-intensive sciences in the health disciplines, has advanced data sharing policy and set up an open data framework through data repositories such as Human Genome Project, HapMap project, database of Genotypes and Phenotypes, and the Genetic Association Information Network, to name a few (Kaye et al., 2009). Their success stories have changed scientific practice, leading researchers widely share and reuse genomic sequence data. The quality of the secondary data is assured by data curation practices through the open data repositories. Sharing policies and regulations were established based on the ongoing participation of and scientific endeavors by the research community. Unfortunately, our data did not show the impact of data repository for the intention of data reuse practice. However, our finding could be indicative of a lack of access to data repositories in health sciences beyond genomics. With the recent efforts of funding agencies, journals, and patient advocacy groups, clinical data repositories have gained much attention by clinical research communities (Olson and Downey, 2013). Building on knowledge gained from genomic data repositories, newly established clinical data repositories will move data reuse forward. Even though the effect of data repository availability on data reuse was not found significant in this study, it can be an important role in facilitating data reuse among scientists, especially in the case of large bioinformatics data sets, e.g., Genomic data, fMRI data. A respondent from the field of Bioinformatics emphasized the use of data repository: “My group uses data from multi-investigator data repositories sponsored by NIH. Genomics, fMRI brain imaging, LINCS etc. Not borrowed from individual investigators.” This study also yields insights into the potential roles of research and academic libraries can play to better facilitate open data movements in health sciences. The results of this study confirmed the significant impact of organizational support on scientists’ data reuse intention. This implies that health science researchers receiving support from their institution are likely to use existing data sets. Libraries can serve an important role in supporting health scientists at the institutional level. In academic library communities, data services and management have emerged as new roles and responsibilities for health sciences librarians in recent years (Cooper and Crum, 2013; Tenopir et al., 2014). Those new data services roles should include librarians providing data reference services, which guide researchers to find existing data from data repositories. To do that, librarians need to know the various data repositories and sources of health science data. Also, librarians need to actively communicate with researchers to understand their data needs, and engage in research processes which enable librarian-embedded reference services.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| National Institutes of Health (NIH) |
Keywords
- Data repository
- Data reuse
- Data sharing
- Health scientists
- Social norm
- Theory of planned behaviour
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Information Systems
- Library and Information Sciences