Experimental data availability is a cornerstone to scientific research. Building on existing research, replicating research and extending on research is fundamental, especially in the domain of experimental mechanics. With this work, we study the availability of experimental data from 2000 to 2016. The most cited research per year related to the field of experimental damage was identified from the Web of Science scientific repository and analyzed for the presence of an e-mail contact address. A short survey on the availability and willingness to share the underlying research data was sent to the original researchers. Answers were analyzed and 37 out of 187 researchers replied. Only 11 researchers were willing to share the raw experimental data and could still access it. A number of issues with the availability of the experimental data are identified and discussed. Two main issues are characterized as follows. First, e-mail addresses are insufficient for long term availability because 42 were not existent any more. Second, some reported lacking storage space to archive large data sets.
In the sub folder data the 11 articles per year (2000-2016), which were utilized in the study, are stored in the bibtex format. In the folder data/WoS_export the raw exported from Web of Science is stored.
This data set was used in following publication
- Diehl, Patrick, Ilyass Tabiai, Felix W. Baumann, and Martin Levesque. "Long term availability of raw experimental data in experimental fracture mechanics." arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.07622 (2018). Link
- P. Diehl, I. Tabiai, F. W. Baumann, D. Therriault, and M. Levesque, Long term availability of raw experimental data in experimental fracture mechanics, Engineering Fracture Mechanics, 197 (2018), pp. 21–26