The Journal Article as a Means to Share Data: a Content Analysis of Supplementary Materials from Two Disciplines

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The practice of publishing supplementary materials with journal articles is becoming increasingly prevalent across the sciences. We sought to understand better the content of these materials by investigating the differences between the supplementary materials published by authors in the geosciences and plant sciences. METHODS We conducted a random stratified sampling of four articles from each of 30 journals published in 2013. In total, we examined 297 supplementary data files for a range of differen