This paper was presented at “The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research” workshop, Torino, Italy, in April, 2010. See: http://www.carloalberto.org/files/brick_dime_strike_workshopagenda_april2010.pdf.The public-use data analyzed in this paper: Pienta, Amy M., and Jared Lyle. Data Sharing in the Social Sciences, 2009 [United States] Public Use Data. ICPSR29941-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2016-12-15. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR29941.v1The goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which social science research data are shared and assess whether data sharing affects research productivity tied to the research data themselves. We construct a database from administrative records containing information about thousands of social science studies that have been conducted over the last 40 years. Included in the database are descriptions of social science data collections funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. A survey of the principal investigators of a subset of these social science awards was also conducted. We report that very few social science data collections are preserved and disseminated by an archive or institutional repository. Informal sharing of data in the social sciences is much more common. The main analysis examines publication metrics that can be tied to the research data collected with NSF and NIH funding – total publications, primary publications (including PI), and secondary publications (non-research team). Multivariate models of count of publications suggest that data sharing, especially sharing data through an archive, leads to many more times the publications than not sharing data. This finding is robust even when the models are adjusted for PI characteristics, grant award features, and institutional characteristics.National Library of Medicine (R01 LM009765). The creation of the LEADS database was also supported by the following research projects at ICPSR: P01 HD045753, U24 HD048404, and P30 AG004590.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78307/1/pienta_alter_lyle_100331.pdf-
