Public availability of research data in dentistry journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports

Abstract

Objectives: Dentistry is a medical discipline with an increasing scientific production in the last years. Due to the importance of data sharing in science, this study aims at analyzing the availability of raw data in articles from scientific journals indexed in the Dentistry category of the 2014 edition of the Journal Citation Reports.

Material and methods: A review of the 88 websites of journals from the Dentistry category was conducted to determine the data-sharing editorial policies. Furthermore, a search in the PubMed Central repository to collect information about the characteristics of the supplementary material of articles from those journals was carried out.

Results: The possibility of publishing a supplementary material was higher in the first quartile journals. A percentage of 7.6% of the articles registered in PubMed Central contained a supplementary material, especially text documents, but the presence of spreadsheets was scarce.

Conclusions: There is a relationship between openness policies and the impact of the journals according to their quartile or position ranking by the impact factor in the JCR, but the willingness of sharing raw data in spreadsheets format is still limited.

Clinical relevance: This study will reveal the resources of raw data which will improve quality of research and clinical practice.

Keywords: Data sharing; Dentistry; Open access; Open data; Supplementary material.