FAIRness of dental research data

Context: The final goal of publishing results in science is to allow other researchers to reproduce and validate the results independently. This validation requires detailed reporting of the methods used and ideally of the data. Also, the decreasing cost of online storage allows research data to be shared simply, cheaply and for a long time. In some areas, such as climate science, it is usual for researchers to contribute their data to large repositories that allow both validation, replication, and finding new findings in the data. To help with the task of facilitating the sharing and reuse of research data, the FAIR principles were published in 2016 (Wilkinson et al., 2016). These refer to a series of elements that shared data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reproducible. These principles enable both humans and machines to access and understand research data.
Objectives: To assess the percentage of dental research that publishes its original data and what percentage of available dental research data complies with the FAIR principles.
Study Design: Bibliometric descriptive study
Data and methods: From all Europe PubMed Central open access (PMCOA) articles and a random sample of 500 non-PMCOA articles published in PubMed-indexed dental journals in the last five years will be searched for data sharing using the rtransparent and oddpub packages in R. Data sharing in articles will be mapped by journal, keywords and year. Then, data shared via the repositories will be analyzed to verify compliance with FAIR principles using the FAIRsFAIR Data Object Assessment Metrics(Devaraju et al., 2020).