Research data availability contributes to the transparency of the research process and the credibility of educational psychology research and science in general. Recently, there have been many initiatives to increase the availability and quality of research data. Many research institutions have adopted research data policies. This increased awareness might have raised the sharing of research data in empirical articles. To test this idea, we coded N = 1242 publications from six educational psychology journals and the psychological journal Cognition (as a baseline) published in 2018 and 2020. Research data availability was low (3.85% compared to 62.74% in Cognition) but has increased from 0.32% (2018) to 7.16% (2020). However, neither the data transparency level of the journal nor the existence of an official research data policy on the level of the corresponding author's institution was related to research data availability. We discuss the consequences of these findings for institutional research data management processes. <hr> **Figure 1** Flow chart depicting the different stages of article selection. Of the initial 1242 articles, only 350 included a valid link to the corresponding research data; ~ 63% of the empirical articles published in the Journal Cognition **and only ~4% of the empirical articles published in the educational psychology journals**. ![Research data availability][1] [1]: https://files.osf.io/v1/resources/6mw7a/providers/osfstorage/625ef21f94195f0186ce356b?mode=render=10%x