Understanding the process of data reuse: An extensive review

Data reuse has recently become significant in academia and is providing new impetus for academic research. This prompts two questions: What precisely is the data reuse process? What is the connection between each participating element? To address these issues, 42 studies were reviewed to identify the stages and primary data reuse elements. A meta‐synthesis was used to locate and analyze the studies, and inductive coding was used to organize the analytical process. We identified three stages of data reuse—initiation, exploration and collection, and repurposing—and explored how they interact and form iterative characteristics. The results illuminated the data reuse at each stage, including issues of data trust, data sources, scaffolds, and barriers. The results indicated that multisource data and human scaffolds promote reuse behavior effectively. Further, two data and information search patterns were extracted: reticular centripetal patterns and decentralized centripetal patterns. Three paths with elements cooperating through flexible functions and motivated by different action items were identified: data centers, human scaffolds, and publications. This study supports improvements for data infrastructure construction, data reuse, and data reuse research by providing a new perspective on the effect of information behavior and clarifying the stages and contextual relationships between various elements.