The Field-Specificity of Data Practices and the Public Sharing of Research Data (Part 2): How Patterns of Data Sharing and Re-Use Reflect Epistemic Practices of Research

Abstract

Based on data from a large, multidisciplinary survey of researchers at German Universities, we explore how field-level rates of the public sharing and re-use of research data are linked to field-specific epistemic practices. A previous analysis of this data revealed strong field differences in rates of public sharing and re-use of research data (Velden et al., 2026). These differences become very pronounced when using a fine-grained field-classification, suggesting that data sharing and data reuse practices are closely linked to how research communities produce knowledge. Here, we examine this hypothesis for 19 selected subfields. We triangulate the measured field-level rates with the science studies literature about field-specific epistemic practices and data sharing. We conclude that epistemic factors, specifically the accessibility of empirical objects and the (perceived) analytic potential of research data produced, are key factors for explaining differences in data reuse and data sharing within and across fields. Importantly for research policy, our findings suggest that because of the close coupling of data sharing and re-use practices with epistemic practices, differences in epistemic practices need to be accounted for at a rather granular level, when designing open science policies and assessing their success.