The landscape of archived studies in a social science data infrastructure: Investigating the ICPSR metadata records.

Data sharing and reuse practices in social sciences have changed in the past few decades with the continuing development of cyber‐infrastructures. However, little is known about how such practices chronically change over time. Via the lens of 35 years' worth of archived data on the world's largest social science data infrastructure, ICPSR, this study aims to reveal data characteristics (e.g., archived data themes and temporal distribution) that shape and represent the trend of social science data sharing and reuse. After a preliminary analysis on metadata of 10,362 studies and 159,616 associated citation records, an upward trend is found regarding the number of studies archived on ICPSR and their citation counts. We also report problems with metadata standards and the challenges of reusing data derived from these studies. Our results can be a cornerstone to investigate the roles of ICPSR as a research data infrastructure within the context of open science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]