Lost or Found? Discovering Data Needed for Research
Lost or Found? Discovering Data Needed for Research
May 2020
ICYMI, announced April 30th - Lost or Found? Discovering Data Needed for Research. Harvard Data Science Review. https://t.co/X4wFyuQe0p Survey of researcher behavior in identifying what they need and sources for locating that data.
Reusing data created by others holds great promise in research. Little is known, however, about how researchers actually discover and use data that they do not create themselves. Which data do they seek? For which purposes? Where do they look? How do they make sense of data once they find them? This article presents evidence from the largest known global survey examining these questions. 1677 respondents in 105 countries, representing a variety of disciplinary domains, professional roles and stages in their academic careers, completed the survey. The results represent respondents’ data needs, the sources and strategies they use to locate data, and the criteria they employ when evaluating data for reuse. We discuss the practical applications these findings have for designers of data repositories and search systems.
Preferred citation: Gregory, K., Groth, P., Scharnhorst, A., & Wyatt, S. (2020). Lost or Found? Discovering Data Needed for Research . Harvard Data Science Review. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.e38165eb
