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Characterizing Data Practices in Research Papers Across Four Disciplines

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Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity (iConference 2023)

Abstract

Research Data Practices (RDP) refer to research activities conducted across the lifespan of data. Characterizing RDP in disciplinary contexts is beneficial for providing data stakeholders with practical understanding of RDP necessary to design data curation services which are tailored to researchers’ need. In this paper, we focus on the five most common types of RDP – collecting data, processing data, analyzing data, representing data, and publishing or citing data. First, we compared the distributions of the five types of RDP across disciplines and observed noticeable differences between disciplines. In addition, we examined the characteristics of each type of RDP under different disciplinary contexts, by developing discipline-specific RDP vocabulary employing the tf-idf approach. Based on the common terms as well as the discipline-specific ones, we found that the five types of RDP can be distinctly conceptualized, while each type of RDP varies by disciplines in terms of their action, object, and instrument.

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This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72174014 and Grant No. 72010107003).

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Correspondence to Wenqi Li .

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Lee, S., Li, W., Zhang, P., Wang, J. (2023). Characterizing Data Practices in Research Papers Across Four Disciplines. In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity. iConference 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13971. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_26

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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