¹ Estimations range up to 33,100 active peer-reviewed English-language journals in 2018, which have collectively published approximately 3 million articles (Johnson et al., 2018, p. 25).

² For the field of economics also other JCR subsets are of potential interest, e.g. Business (140 journals), Business and Finance (98 journals), Management (210 journals) and Operations Research and Management (84 Journals). All journals included in these subsets have an Impact Factor and are part of the SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) which is –like the Impact Factor– a proprietary product of Clarivate Analytics.

When looking at how many journals from these rankings are also represented in JCR ECON 2017, the following figures emerge: 13 journals (9.2%) from JCR Business, 40 (39.3%) from JCR Business and Finance, 12 (5.7%) from JCR Management, and another 13 (15.5%) from JCR Operations Research. For this reason, the results of this article relate primarily to journals found in the JCR ECON 2017 and, to a lesser extent, to business and finance journals.

³ We did not examine the printed issues of the journals, although we are aware of one case where the data policy is not available online, but only in the printed issue. Therefore, the results of the analysis describe the lower limit of the data policies found in our sample. The actual number of journals with a data policy is likely to be higher.

⁴ It was not always easy to distinguish between editorial policies that aim to achieve reproducibility of results and editorial notes that only explain what types of files can generally be processed in the submission process. In cases in which only the possibility to also submit data sets was mentioned in general, but no further instructions in terms of requirements for reproducibility were given, we did not consider such a note as a data policy.

⁵ For instance, some experimental designs require other replication files than simulations do. To have a comparability among the different methodologies in economics, we only looked for those files that are important for most methodological approaches.

⁶ Commercial data providers generally do not allow any sharing of research data, even for the purpose of reproducing published results. For example, Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) - a major aggregator of access to numerous databases from commercial providers - states in its terms of use: “Except as provided under the terms of the Subscription Agreement, you may not reproduce, distribute, modify, adapt, create derivative works of, display, transmit, broadcast, sell, license or in any way exploit the Proprietary Material, in whole or in part, without our advance written consent.” (Wharton Research Data Services, 2021).

⁷ Details of the operationalisation are available in appendix A.

⁸ The SSCI is a set of journals of several Clarivate (formerly Thomson Reuters) Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for the social sciences. It includes more than 3400 journals and is subdivided into 58 (non-exclusive) disciplinary rankings. The JCR ECON is one of these disciplinary rankings. For the field of economics also other JCR subsets are of potential interested, e.g. Business (140 journals), Business and Finance (98 journals), Management (210 journals) and Operations Research and Management (84 Journals).

⁹ Please check appendix A for a detailed description of how a data policy has been assigned to one of the types. Some special cases are journals published by the SpringerNature group: As part of the ‘ethical responsibilities of authors’, these journals include a short paragraph on ‘data disclosure upon request’. In addition, a substantial part of these journals has a dedicated data policy. Journals with an additional data policy have been categorised as journals with a DAP, while those without a dedicated data policy have been categorised as journals with an ARP. Always the more strict policy type was decisive for the categorisation.

¹⁰ On average, the impact factor of the 262 journals was 1.98 (SD: 3.36). The 25% percentile was 0.86, the median 1.37 and the 75% percentile 2.4. For a detailed description of the sample, please cf. Vlaeminck and Herrmann (2015a).

¹¹ One hundred twenty six of the 223 journals from the 2014 study were also listed in the JCR ECON. The average impact factor of these 126 journals was 1.49 (SD: 1.2). Thirty-three journals had a DAP (26.2%), eight journals (6.4%) had an ARP. Also for this reduced subsample, the results remain comparable. The numbers for the 126 journals listed in the JCR ECON are even higher than reported for the sample of all the 262 IF-journals. For comparison: datasets (100%), program code (82.9%), descriptions (75.6%), intermediate datasets (34.2%), mandatory data policies (78.1%), procedure for restricted data (51.2%).