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

provide several elements for digital identifiers, license information and citation. In addition, some standards provide elements for data quality checks. For instance, ISO19115 offers a con- tainer for data quality including lineage information and EML supports quality checks with the qualityControl element. Increasingly, semantic formats are supported. While some standards already provide or are currently developing fully semantic standards (ABCD, Dar- win Core, OAI-ORE, OME-XML and CEDAR), others provide elements to link taxonomies (Genome Metadata, PDBx/mmCIF) or started integrating controlled vocabularies (ISA-Tab, UKEOF, CEDAR). Results In our second analysis, we compared the information categories with elements of the metadata standards to figure out, if search interests can be explicitly described with metadata elements. Our results are presented in Table 3. The detailed matching between categories and metadata fields is available as csv file in our GitHub repository. For the sake of completeness, we explored all 13 categories from the previous analysis but marked the ones with an asterisk that had a fair agreement (< 0.4). The categories are sorted by frequency from left to right. The red color denotes that no element is available in the standard to express the category, orange indi- cates that only a general field could be used to describe the category and a yellow cell implies that one or more elements are available in the standard for this search interest.

Table 3. Comparison of metadata standards and information categories. The categories are sorted by the frequency of their occurrence determined in the previous question analysis, the asterisk denotes the categories with an agreement less than 0.4. Environment Quality� Material Organism Process Location Data Type� Method� Anatomy� Human Intervention� Event� Time Person DublinCore DataCite ISO19115 FDGC/CSDGM EML DarwinCore RDFDataCube ISA − Tab DIF CF ABCD DCAT OAI − ORE SDMX Genome Metadata OME-XML PDB/mmCIF UKEOF CSMD-CCLRC CEDAR OM Table key Red: Not provided, Orange: Unspecific (general element), Yellow: Available (one or more elements) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246099.t003 PLOS ONE Dataset search in biodiversity research PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246099 March 24, 2021 18 / 36