Research Data Availability in Articles Published in Educational Psychology Journals

Research data availability contributes to the transparency of the research process and the credibility of educational psychology research and science in general. Recently, there have been many initiatives to increase the availability and quality of research data. Many research institutions have adopted research data policies. This increased awareness might have raised the availability of research data in empirical articles. To test this idea, we coded N = 1172 publications from five educational psychology journals (including educational psychology) and the psychological journal Cognition (as a baseline) published in 2018 and 2020. Only about 4% of the empirical articles in the educational psychology journals shared their research data. Indeed, research data availability increased between 2018 and 2020 at the relatively low level. However, neither the data transparency level of the journal nor the existence of an official research data policy on the level of the corresponding author's institution was related to research data availability. We discuss the consequences of these findings for institutional research data management processes.