Data Sharing for Randomized Controlled Trials in Social Work

Abstract

Sharing data publicly can provide numerous benefits to the data owner, data user, as well as the social work research community as a whole. Given the time and resources required to collect data in randomized controlled trials, gleaning the maximum amount of information from this data is highly desirable. Data sets considered to be exhausted by the primary research team often have valuable information that can be used by researchers with different research interests or analytic skill sets. Sharing these data allows other researchers to use these data to answer their research questions without duplicating the data collection efforts. Sharing data can also increase attention to the work of the primary research team, with papers with open data receiving more citations than those without public data. Engaging in open science practices such as data sharing can lead research to be seen as more trustworthy and reliable.