An analysis of data availability statements for qualitative articles in PLOS journals

Over the past decade, many scholarly journals have adopted policies on data sharing, with an increasing number of journals requiring that authors share the data underlying their published work. Frequently, qualitative data are excluded from those policies explicitly or implicitly. A few journals, however, intentionally do not make such a distinction. This project focuses on articles published in eight of the open-access journals maintained by Public Library of Science (PLOS). All PLOS journals introduced strict data guidelines in 2014, which apply to all empirical data on the basis of which articles are published. We collected a database of more than 2,300 articles containing a qualitative data component published between January 1, 2015 and August 23, 2023 and analyzed the data availability statements (DAS) researchers made regarding the availability, or lack thereof, of their data. We describe the degree to which and manner in which data are reportedly available (for example, in repositories, via institutional gate-keepers, or on request from author) versus those that are declared to be unavailable. We also outline several dimensions of patterned variation in the data availability statements, including temporal patterns and variation by data type. Based on the results, we also provide recommendations to both researchers, on how to make their data availability statements clearer, more transparent and more informative, and to journal editors and reviewers, on how to interpret and evaluate statements to ensure they accurately reflect a given data availability scenario. Finally, we suggest a workflow which can link interactions with repositories most productively as part of a typical editorial process.