The relationship between mediated deposit and research data use metrics

Abstract

Many universities and research institutes have invested resources in data repository services, meeting increasing funder and journal requirements for longer-term research data access. These service investments include those for data curation towards improving the quality of accessible research data. We investigated whether data use is enhanced by these curatorial services. Here we present results of statistical comparisons of data use (views, downloads and citations) between samples of a) datasets without curatorial review (non-mediated deposit), and b) datasets with curatorial review and improvement (mediated deposit). These samples are derived from Digital Science’s figshare platforms a) figshare.com and b) figshare for institutions instances worldwide. Our results clearly show that mediated deposit with curatorial review is associated with increased data use in terms of pageviews and downloads. In making the same comparison for these datasets when broken into high-level disciplinary categories, we found the same association for all samples where a statistical comparison was valid. The impact of mediated deposit on citation metrics remains inconclusive. These results can be used to inform future investments in data repository and curation services.