Research as Data Work: How Early Career Researchers Enact Open Research Data in Practice

Open Research Data (ORD) is increasingly promoted as a core dimension of Open Science, yet less is known about how researchers enact data-related practices in everyday scholarly work and how such practices are learned. This study investigates research as situated data work, focusing on the practices and learning ecologies of doctoral researchers.

A survey instrument was developed to operationalise research data practices across four dimensions: Seeking and Retrieving Research Data (SeekRD), Managing and Processing Research Data (ManageRD), Sharing Research Data (SharRD), and Evaluating Research Quality through Data (EvalRQ). A further set of scales examined researchers’ learning ecologies through activities, resources, and relationships. The instrument was iteratively validated through a two-round Delphi study (Raffaghelli, 2019) involving seven international experts in educational research, digital scholarship, data literacy, and Open Science, yielding substantial inter-expert agreement (Fleiss’ κ = .77–.79).

The questionnaire was administered through Qualtrics across multiple cohorts of doctoral researchers participating in Open Data training workshops between 2023 and 2025. Depending on item completion, the analytical sample ranged from approximately 90 to 129 respondents. Data were examined through descriptive and non-parametric analyses of practice frequency, reliability assessment, and exploratory Principal Component Analysis to investigate configurations of data practices and learning ecologies.

The main findings showed that research data practices were unevenly distributed. Data generation and conventional data management were relatively established, whereas data sharing, reuse, publication in open repositories, and engagement with formal Open Science frameworks were considerably less frequent. Ethical reflection emerged as a comparatively embedded dimension of everyday research practice. Exploratory analyses further suggested that open practices did not constitute a separate configuration of research activity, but were intertwined with broader patterns of data circulation, production and management, and reflexive evaluation. Learning about data work was also strongly supported by informal, self-directed, and relational learning ecologies.

This dataset (composed by the codebook, the R script and the row dataset) informed the contribution presented by Juliana E. Raffaghelli at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER 2026), organised by the European Educational Research Association (EERA), under the title Research as Data Work: How Doctoral Researchers Enact Open Research Data in Practice, as a contribution to Network 12, Open Research in Education.