After meeting with my mentors (Amber Budden and Heather Soyka) on May 20, week one work was broken into two components (1) Begin a lit review on the benefits of data sharing and (2) Create a summary table of DataONE Member Nodes.
(1) The initial lit review revealed a lot of qualitative articles and opinion pieces spouting the societal benefits of data sharing, and how to shift the norm in the environmental field towards more data sharing. There was a dearth of quantitative article and the few I could find with with metrics measuring benefits were located in the biomedical field (because the majority of papers are published in that field). This week, I will focus on finding more quantitative articles and beginning the summary write-up of the analysis.
NOTE: The search database used was the USC Libraries, and because this isn’t a formal lit review, the papers were often pulled from the citations of previous papers. Search words included: Data Sharing, Benefits of Data Sharing, Open Data, Open Data Access etc.
(2) The second project is a statistical analysis of DataONE’s impact on data sharing. The first part of the project involved pulling information about the 30 member nodes off of the website and putting it in a summary sheet including software platform and download and upload information. Next, we’ll be requesting view and download information for each member node and analyzing if there is any significant difference in data downloads before and after joining the DataONE repository.
NOTE: During this process, I will likely stumble upon some glitches in the website. There were some discrepancies found between two different pages on the website in regards to upload numbers (both pages include timelines). For example the EDAC data between the two pages is slightly different HERE and HERE.
Erika