An Exploratory Study of the Cross‐border Flow of Research Data in the <scp>US</scp> and China

ABSTRACT In the era of globalization, academic resources flow around the world. The cross‐border flow of traditional academic publications such as e‐journals and databases has received widespread attention and has formed basic flow rules. As an emerging and important academic resource, research data also travels across borders. However, most of the research focuses on how to regulate the cross‐border flow of research data, and very few addressed statistical analysis of the cross‐border flow of research data. This paper aims to study Chinese and the US data repositories and illustrated the cross‐border flow and multi‐national cooperation of research data among the data repositories, using proportion analysis, word frequency analysis, and social network analysis. This paper found that the degree of data localization in China and the US is high. Among the flowing research data, the US is more diverse in terms of flow direction, subjects and cooperative relationships.