  As the importance of research data gradually grows in sciences, data sharing
has come to be encouraged and even mandated by journals and funders in recent
years. Following this trend, the data availability statement has been
increasingly embraced by academic communities as a means of sharing research
data as part of research articles. This paper presents a quantitative study of
which mechanisms and repositories are used to share research data in PLOS ONE
articles. We offer a dynamic examination of this topic from the disciplinary
and temporal perspectives based on all statements in English-language research
articles published between 2014 and 2020 in the journal. We find a slow yet
steady growth in the use of data repositories to share data over time, as
opposed to sharing data in the paper or supplementary materials; this indicates
improved compliance with the journal's data sharing policies. We also find that
multidisciplinary data repositories have been increasingly used over time,
whereas some disciplinary repositories show a decreasing trend. Our findings
can help academic publishers and funders to improve their data sharing policies
and serve as an important baseline dataset for future studies on data sharing
activities.
