Objective: Publisher policies have long guided scientists on how to cite publications, but now many publishers have adopted policies for data citation and sharing. This project examines the data sharing and citation practices of MIT authors in atmospheric sciences, a field that has seen a recent rise of publisher data policies. Through a multipronged approach, we sought to understand how research groups in this discipline find and cite data used in their research, share their own produced research data, and what variables (specifically funder and publisher mandates) may alter or influence this behavior.

Methods: Through group interviews with research labs in the atmospheric sciences and a bibliometric study of their publications over the last 4 years (~200 papers), we looked to create a more holistic understanding of our researchers’ activity and data-sharing perceptions in this area.

Results: Preliminary results show that while researchers are not yet consistently providing persistent identifiers to datasets or making full data sets publicly available, they perceive their data sharing efforts to be in line with the expectations and needs of their community. Such inconsistencies in publisher language and researcher behavior highlight the need to further explore definitions of data sharing, underlying data, etc., across stakeholders.

Conclusions: This work expands our knowledge of how our researchers are interpreting and acting upon their data sharing obligations and serves as an initial partnership between our data management services and subject liaisons in order to increase our understanding of data sharing at the discipline level.