A systematic review of barriers to data sharing in public health

BMC Public Health

Table 1 Evidence for barriers to sharing of routinely collected public health data

Category	Barrier	Peer-reviewed		Non peer-reviewed
		Empirical data	Non-empirical*
Technical	1. Data not collected	[6, 21, 24, 31]	[2, 4, 7, 18, 22, 14, 26–28, 30]	[3, 23, 25]
	2. Data not preserved		[33]	[3, 32, 34, 35]
	3. Data not found		[45]	[3, 34]
	4. Language barrier			[36]
	5. Restrictive data format		[40]	[3, 34, 36–39, 41]
	6. Technical solutions not available		[42]	[37]
	7. Lack of metadata and standards	[21, 24, 43]	[40, 44, 45]	[1, 35–37, 39, 41, 46]
Motivational	8. No incentives		[27, 45, 49]	[35]
	9. Opportunity cost	[51, 52]	[13, 33, 50, 53]	[35]
	10. Possible criticism		[33]	[32]
	11. Disagreement on data use	[21]	[49]
Economic	12. Possible economic damage		[7, 26, 27, 30]	[55]
	13. Lack of resources	[56, 21]	[13, 27, 28, 30, 42, 53, 57]	[3, 23, 34–36, 39, 37]
Political	14. Lack of trust	[19, 59, 60]	[33, 61]	[34–37]
	15. Restrictive policies		[30]
	16. Lack of guidelines		[45, 62, 65]	[37, 41, 63, 64]
Legal	17. Ownership and copyright		[62, 65, 66, 69]	[37, 63, 64, 67]
	18. Protection of privacy	[12, 19, 59, 73, 75]	[44, 57, 62, 66, 72, 74]	[36, 37, 64, 67, 68, 70, 71]
Ethical	19. Lack of proportionality			[76]
	20. Lack of reciprocity	[51, 52]	[50, 77, 78]
Number of unique documents (% of total)		14 (21.5%)	30 (46.2%)	21 (32.3%)