Matthews, Abigail and Rantanen, Jason, Legal Research as a Collective Enterprise: An Examination of Data Availability in Empirical Legal Scholarship (March 14, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4057663 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4057663

“This study is the first extensive examination of the degree to which the information underlying empirical legal studies is available for other researchers to review, use for replication, and build on, and to consider hypotheses driving data availability. Our study encompasses every empirical legal study published in twenty top law journals from 2010–2019 by Washington & Lee impact factor. We also consider two peer-reviewed journals: the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, a peer-reviewed journal, and the Northwestern Law Review, which was an early adopter of a full peer review policy for empirical legal studies. Overall, we find very low levels of data availability in law journals. Of the 911 empirical studies we examine, only 12% had a dataset that was available without asking the author. Nor has the adoption of mechanisms that researchers have proposed made any difference: the data provides no support for the idea that peer review or data sharing policies are associated with greater data availability, or that researchers have become more sensitive to this issue over time. Given this finding, we advocate for a disciplinary and cultural shift that embraces data accessibility.”