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In recent years, a large number of data repositories have been built and used. However, the extent to which scientific data are re-used in academic publications is still unknown. The purpose of this paper is to explore the functions of re-used scientific data in scholarly publication in different fields.

To address these questions, the authors identified 827 publications citing resources in the Dryad Digital Repository indexed by Scopus from 2010 to 2015.

The results show that: the number of citations to scientific data increases sharply over the years, but mainly from data-intensive disciplines, such as agricultural, biology science, environment science and medicine; the majority of citations are from the originating articles; and researchers tend to reuse data produced by their own research groups.

Dryad data may be re-used without being formally cited.

The conservatism in data sharing suggests that more should be done to encourage researchers to re-use other’s data.