Abstract
Purpose Publishing research data for reuse has become good practice in recent years. However, not much is known on how researchers actually find said data. In this exploratory study, we observe the information-seeking behaviour of social scientists searching for research data to reveal impediments and identify opportunities for data search infrastructure.Methods We asked 12 participants to search for research data and observed them in their natural environment. The sessions were recorded. Afterwards, we conducted semi-structured interviews to get a thorough understanding of their way of searching. From the recordings, we extracted the interaction behaviour of the participants and analysed the spoken words both during the search task and the interview by creating affinity diagrams.Results We found that literature search is more closely intertwined with dataset search than previous literature suggests. Both the search itself and the relevance assessment are very complex, and many different strategies are employed, including the creatively “misuse” of existing tools, since no appropriate tools exist or are unknown to the participants.Conclusion Many of the issues we found relate directly or indirectly to the application of the FAIR principles, but some, like a greater need for dataset search literacy, go beyond that. Both infrastructure and tools offered for dataset search could be tailored more tightly to the observed work processes, particularly by offering more interconnectivity between datasets, literature, and other relevant materials.
Highlights
Publishing research data along with the primary publication is becoming good practice or even mandatory1 in academic research
Traditional models of the informationseeking process are usually rooted in the area of document retrieval or web search in general
Lack of Knowledge Participants showed a varying level of knowledge about data portals, data search engines (e.g. Google Dataset Search was unknown to all participants), and datasets of popular surveys
Summary
Publishing research data along with the primary publication is becoming good practice or even mandatory in academic research. Making research replicable and discovering information that remained unmentioned or uncovered in the primary analysis is a driver for publishing data [33]. Research on information seeking in web search and digital libraries has a long tradition [7]. Traditional models of the informationseeking process are usually rooted in the area of document retrieval or web search in general. The applicability of traditional models of the information-seeking process in the area of dataset retrieval is uncertain. The stages of the information-seeking process [12] described by Ellis have been widely accepted throughout the literature, but whether these stages are representative for the process of dataset retrieval is unknown. A more fine grained view on different stages of the information-seeking process during dataset retrieval is so far not available
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