Network Analysis of Data Reuse in the Social Sciences

Studies of the citation networks of scientific papers show that science is slowly but surely becoming more interdisciplinary: publications increasingly incorporate ideas from disciplines outside of the primary authors', and authors from different disciplines more frequently collaborate and co-author papers. Few, if any, studies, however, have distinguished between interdisciplinary collaboration or knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary data reuse. Given the significant barriers to data sharing and reuse that can arise even within a given discipline, it is possible that patterns of interdisciplinary data reuse differ somewhat from those of other kinds of interdisciplinarity. This paper examines patterns of interdisciplinary data reuse in the social sciences through a network analysis of data citation information from ICPSR. The results will offer insight for data producers and data managers in curating data to foster interdisciplinary reuse.