What are Researchers’ Needs in Data Discovery? Analysis and Ranking of a Large-Scale Collection of Crowdsourced Use Cases

Abstract

Data discovery is important to facilitate data re-use. In order to help frame the development and improvement of data discovery tools, we collected a list of requirements and users’ wishes. This paper presents the analysis of these 101 use cases to examine data discovery requirements; these cases were collected between 2019 and 2020. We categorized the information across 12 ‘topics’ and eight types of users. While the availability of metadata was an expected topic of importance, users were also keen on receiving more information on data citation and a better overview of their field. We conducted and analysed a survey among data infrastructure specialists in a first attempt at ranking the requirements. Between these data professionals, these rankings were very different, excepting the availability of metadata and data quality assessment.