1 Citation
This project is designed to elicit data discovery contexts from researchers across Australia’s research system. As Australia’s leading research data coordinating agency, Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has identified a need for a greater understanding of the contexts around which data users approach their data discovery journey. Specifically, the study has been designed to answer the following research questions: How do researchers approach data discovery? How do researchers search for data? What data attributes matter to researchers’ data search? What criteria do researchers apply for assessing relevance and usability of datasets? What are the contexts of data reuse by researchers? This study adopted a mixed-method approach to answer the proposed research questions by using both survey and in-depth interview methods. A pre-interview survey was designed to capture participant background information, including; their research areas/topics, stage of career, job roles and their data sources in recent projects. We designed the interview protocol along each step of the data lifecycle and adopted a critical incident technique (CIT) protocol to conduct semi-structured in-depth interviews to elicit the contexts of data discovery. Through the analysis of interview data, we characterise the contexts of data discovery both within and across disciplines. Our findings suggest that there are significant technical and social aspects in the research process to enable effective data discovery. Researchers’ data discovery journeys are embedded in their information-seeking environments, such as their known data repositories, social networks and part of a consortium of collaborative research projects. However, researchers face challenges in discovering data from a single data repository - in particular when the required data for a research project have to be discovered and synthesised from multiple data repositories. Both metadata and data quality have been identified as critical for data discovery and data reuse regardless of discipline. For those with significant experience in data discovery, there was greater recognition of the need for data governance and the importance of data publication for re-use. Based on our initial findings we aim to provide further analysis of the rich material offered. Interviews were conducted with the support of ARDC partners: Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (TERN), Australian Data Archive (ADA) and CSIRO, who have thei...