Sharing the full data sets underlying the results in your article brings many benefits. It enables reuse, reduces research waste, and promotes collaboration. Greater transparency increases trust in research results by allowing results to be independently verified. These benefits lead to a more reliable evidence base and a healthier world.
General Practice in China do not consider the deposition of data, including clinical trial data, in recognised repositories to be prior publication.
Many funders now require that the data sets from the studies they fund be shared. A list of research funders that mandate data archiving is provided by SHERPA/JULIET.
General Practice in China data sharing policy
General Practice in China requires a Data Availability Statement for any submitted research articles. The requirements for data sharing is dependent on the policy the Journal adopts.
General Practice in China has three policies on data sharing:
Tier 1:
We require that the data generated by your research that supports your article be made openly and publicly available upon publication of your article. Where it is not possible or viable to make data openly available (due to confidentiality or sensitivity issues), they should be shared through a controlled access repository.
Tier 2:
We strongly encourage that data generated by your research that supports your article be made available as soon as possible, wherever legally and ethically possible
We require data from clinical trials to be made available upon reasonable request
Tier 3:
We strongly encourage that data generated by your research that supports your article be made available as soon as possible, wherever legally and ethically possible.
Data Availability Statement
General Practice in China requires a Data Availability Statement for any submitted research articles. On submission, authors are asked to select at least one of the standardised Data Availability Statements text options below in bold as applicable and to supplement these statements with additional information as noted in the guidance below. Authors can select more than one statement if they have data under different conditions. The ICMJE recommendations provide further guidance on how to compose a rich statement.
These statements will be published under the header ‘Data Availability Statement’ within the footnotes section of the final published article.
Data are available in a public, open access repository
Please state the repository name, the persistent URL, and any conditions of reuse (eg. licence, embargo). All data that are publicly available and used in the writing of an article should be cited in the text and the reference list, whether they are data generated by the author(s) or by other researchers.
Data are available upon reasonable request
Please state what the data are (e.g. deidentified participant data), who the data are available from, their publishable contact details (e.g. a generic lab email address or an individual’s ORCID identifier – please ensure you have permission) and under what conditions reuse is permitted. Is there additional information available (e.g. protocols, statistical analysis plans)?
Data may be obtained from a third party and are not publicly available
Please state what the data are (e.g. deidentified participant data), who the data are available from, their publishable contact details (e.g. a generic lab email address or an individual’s ORCID identifier – please ensure you have permission), and under what conditions reuse is permitted. Is there additional information available (e.g. protocols, statistical analysis plans)?
All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.
Please ensure this does not include patient identifiable data. Please state ‘Not applicable’ in the free text box.
Data sharing not applicable as no datasets generated and/or analysed for this study.
Please state ‘Not applicable’ in the free text box.
No data are available.
Please state ‘Not applicable’ in the free text box.
How to cite data
All data that are publicly available and used in the writing of an article should be cited in the text and the reference list – whether they are data generated by the author(s) or by other researchers.
Data citations should include author(s), title, data repository, the document version (e.g. most recent date modified), the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and should follow General Practice in China reference style.
Add [dataset] as a prefix immediately before the reference, so we can properly identify it as a data reference; this identifier will not appear in the published article.
How to share data
For clinical data (Individual Participant Data) we request that you use controlled access repositories, such as clinicalstudydatarequest.com, the YODA project, or Vivli. Please see this article for current practical guidance on clinical trial data sharing.
For pre-clinical data we recommend using recognised subject-specific repositories, such as GenBank, where relevant and available.
There are also a number of recognised, general repositories in which to deposit data, for example, DRYAD, OSF, FigShare and Zenodo. FAIRsharing and re3data.org provide a curated list of repositories.
What data should be shared
We encourage you to make available as much of the underlying data from your article as possible (without compromising participant privacy), but at least the minimum data required to reproduce the results presented in the associated article.
