Low Research-Data Availability in Educational-Psychology Journals: No Indication of Effective Research-Data Policies

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Abstract

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 sharing of research data in empirical articles. To test this idea, we coded 1,242 publications from six educational-psychology journals and the psychological journal Cognition (as a baseline) published in 2018 and 2020. Research-data availability was low (3.85% compared with 62.74% in Cognition) but has increased from 0.32% (2018) to 7.16% (2020). 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.