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

Conclusion Scholarly search interests are as diverse as data are and can range from specific information needs such as searches for soil samples collected in a certain environment to broader research questions inspecting relationships among species. Our findings reveal that these search inter- ests are not entirely reflected in existing metadata. One problem are general standards that are simple and mainly contain information that support data citation. Important search interests are only be represented if keywords and suitable search terms are provided in general, non- specific fields. Most data repositories utilize these fields to enrich metadata with suitable search terms. However, if search interests are not explicitly given, facet creation, e.g., filtering over species or habitats, is more difficult. Data findability, one of the four FAIR principles [11], at least partially relies on rich meta- data descriptions reflecting scholarly information needs. If the information scholars are inter- ested is not available in metadata, the primary data can not be retrieved, reused and cited. In order to close this gap, we address challenges to overcome the current obstacles for both, the biodiversity research community and computer science. In our future work, we would like to focus on a machine-supported extraction of relevant search categories in metadata as well as an automatic filling of metadata fields from primary data. That will minimize the metadata creation process and will support scholars and data

repositories in producing proper and rich metadata with semantic enrichment. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the annotators for their time and valuable comments. Author Contributions Conceptualization: Felicitas Lo¨ffler, Friederike Klan. Formal analysis: Felicitas Lo¨ffler, Friederike Klan. Funding acquisition: Birgitta Ko¨nig-Ries. Methodology: Felicitas Lo¨ffler, Friederike Klan. Project administration: Felicitas Lo¨ffler. Resources: Felicitas Lo¨ffler, Valentin Wesp. Software: Felicitas Lo¨ffler, Valentin Wesp, Friederike Klan. Supervision: Birgitta Ko¨nig-Ries. Validation: Felicitas Lo¨ffler, Friederike Klan. Writing – original draft: Felicitas Lo¨ffler, Valentin Wesp. Writing – review & editing: Felicitas Lo¨ffler, Birgitta Ko¨nig-Ries, Friederike Klan. References 1. idiv. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig; 2019. https://www. idiv.de, accessed on 11.04.2019. 2. GBIF. GBIF Science Review 2018. 2018. 3. Culina A, Baglioni M, Crowther TW, Visser ME, Woutersen-Windhouwer S, Manghi P. Navigating the unfolding open data landscape in ecology and evolution. Nature Ecology & Evolution. 2018; 2(3):420– 426. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0458-2 PMID: 29453350 PLOS ONE Dataset search in biodiversity research PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246099 March 24, 2021 32 / 36