Dataset search in biodiversity research: Do metadata in data repositories reflect scholarly information needs?

RESEARCH ARTICLE Dataset search in biodiversity research: Do metadata in data repositories reflect scholarly information needs? Felicitas Lo¨ fflerID1*, Valentin WespID1, Birgitta Ko¨ nig-RiesID1,2,3, Friederike KlanID2,4 1 Heinz Nixdorf Chair for Distributed Information Systems, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany, 2 Michael-Stifel-Center for Data-Driven and Simulation Science, Jena, Germany, 3 German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Halle- Jena-Leipzig, Germany, 4 Citizen Science Group, DLR-Institute of Data Science, German Aerospace Center, Jena, Germany * felicitas.loeffler@uni-jena.de Abstract The increasing amount of publicly available research data provides the opportunity to link and integrate data in order to create and prove novel hypotheses, to repeat experiments or to compare recent data to data collected at a different time or place. However, recent studies have shown that retrieving relevant data for data reuse is a time-consuming task in daily research practice. In this study, we explore what hampers dataset retrieval in biodiversity research, a field that produces a large amount of heterogeneous data. In particular, we focus on scholarly search interests and metadata, the primary source of data in a dataset retrieval system. We show that existing metadata currently poorly reflect information needs and therefore are the biggest obstacle in retrieving relevant data. Our findings indicate that

for data seekers in the biodiversity domain environments, materials and chemicals, species, biological and chemical processes, locations, data parameters and data types are important information categories. These interests are well covered in metadata elements of domain- specific standards. However, instead of utilizing these standards, large data repositories tend to use metadata standards with domain-independent metadata fields that cover search interests only to some extent. A second problem are arbitrary keywords utilized in descrip- tive fields such as title, description or subject. Keywords support scholars in a full text search only if the provided terms syntactically match or their semantic relationship to terms used in a user query is known. Introduction Scientific progress in biodiversity research, a field dealing with the diversity of life on earth— the variety of species, genetic diversity, diversity of functions, interactions and ecosystems [1] -, is increasingly achieved by the integration and analysis of heterogeneous datasets [2, 3]. Therefore, locating and finding proper data for synthesis is a key challenge in daily research practice. Datasets can differ in format and size. Interesting data is often scattered across PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246099 March 24, 2021 1 / 36 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Lo¨ffler F, Wesp V, Ko¨nig-Ries B, Klan F (2021) Dataset search in biodiversity research: Do metadata in data repositories reflect scholarly

information needs? PLoS ONE 16(3): e0246099. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246099 Editor: Hussein Suleman, University of Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA Received: July 5, 2019 Accepted: January 13, 2021 Published: March 24, 2021 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246099 Copyright: © 2021 Lo¨ffler et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The code and data are available in GitHub repository: https://github. com/fusion-jena/QuestionsMetadataBiodiv. In addition, the data has been submitted to the iDiv data portal (https://idata.idiv.de/). https://doi.org/