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Purpose – In recent years, a large number of data repositories have been built and used. However, the extent to which scientific data are re-used in academic publications is still unknown. The purpose of this paper is to explore the functions of re-used scientific data in scholarly publication in different fields. Design/methodology/approach – To address these questions, the authors identified 827 publications citing resources in the Dryad Digital Repository indexed by Scopus from 2010 to 2015. Findings – The results show that: the number of citations to scientific data increases sharply over the years, but mainly from data-intensive disciplines, such as agricultural, biology science, environment science and medicine; the majority of citations are from the originating articles; and researchers tend to reuse data produced by their own research groups. Research limitations/implications – Dryad data may be re-used without being formally cited. Originality/value – The conservatism in data sharing suggests that more should be done to encourage researchers to re-use other’s data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the disciplinary orientation of scientific publications that were mentioned on different social media platforms, focussing on their differences and similarities with citation counts. Design/methodology/approach – Social media metrics and readership counts, associated with 500,216 publications and their citation data from the Web of Science database, were collected from Altmetric.com and Mendeley. Results are presented through descriptive statistical analyses together with science maps generated with VOSviewer. Findings – The results confirm Mendeley as the most prevalent social media source with similar characteristics to citations in their distribution across fields and their density in average values per publication. The humanities, natural sciences, and engineering disciplines have a much lower presence of social media metrics. Twitter has a stronger focus on general medicine and social sciences. Other sources (blog, Facebook, Google+, and news media mentions) are more prominent in regards to multidisciplinary journals. Originality/value – This paper reinforces the relevance of Mendeley as a social media source for analytical purposes from a disciplinary perspective, being particularly relevant for the social sciences (together with Twitter). Key implications for the use of social media metrics on the evaluation of research performance (e.g. the concentration of some social media metrics, such as blogs, news items, etc., around multidisciplinary journals) are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]