Indian Contribution to Medicine Datasets: An Analysis

Abstract

The registry of research data repositories, re3data.org, documents over 1,400 research data repositories worldwide, making it the web's largest and most comprehensive online catalog. The Library and Information Services Department (LIS) of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, the Computer and Media Service at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Purdue University Libraries, and the KIT Library at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are project partners in re3data.org (The Landscape of Research Data Repositories in 2015: A Re3data Analysis, n.d.). After merging with the American DataBib in 2014, re3data.org became a DataCite service in 2016. DataCite is a non-profit international organization that provides a way for researchers to obtain credit and recognition for sharing their research data (The British Library, n.d.). "Research data" refers to a model of raw statistical or visual data gathered from necessary sources during a scientific investigation. A massive amount of data is generated in the medical sciences due to observations, experiments, and clinical investigations. In medicine, there are 961 listed repositories, divided into 48 sub-categories. A few registered repositories are noted as closed, and there are also subjects with no currently listed data repositories. India contributes 2.81% of the total datasets in medicine indexed in re3data.org with 21 datasets. This study aims at analyzing the Indian raw datasets that belong to Medicine in re3.org. The availability and accessibility of research data will aid in discovering new knowledge and developing new approaches for improving research quality. To advance knowledge, researchers affiliated with institutions and organizations should be motivated to deposit and incorporate data gathered through their research into institutional research data repositories or other discipline repositories. There are enormous quantities of organized public health data emerging in various academic, government, or non-commercial disciplines, and making these datasets available, especially in the medical discipline, is extremely necessary to accelerate the research as we live in a world of unforeseeable global medical emergencies. Moreover, re3data.org can potentially improve and promote the best data preservation and management practices.