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

corpus consists of 169 questions and is publicly available: https://github.com/fusion-jena/ QuestionsMetadataBiodiv/tree/master/questions. (2) Category definition. Boundaries of semantic categories are domain-dependent and fuzzy. However, in search, categories support users in finding relevant information more easily and should be valid across various research backgrounds. In a first round, two authors of this work analyzed the collected questions manually. Both have a research background in com- puter science and strong knowledge in scientific data management, in particular for biodiver- sity research. The corpus was split up and each of them inspected around 50% of it and assigned broad categories independently. Afterwards, this first classification was discussed in several sessions. This resulted in 13 categories. The naming was adapted to domain-specific denotations and ontologies. Furthermore, the categories were compared to EASE [43], a meta- data schema which was primarily developed for an improved dataset retrieval in the field of ecology. This comparison revealed that there is an overlap with EASE but that we discovered further relevant categories [51]. The final categories are: 1. ORGANISM comprises all individual life forms including plants, fungi, bacteria, animals and microorganisms. 2. All species live in certain local and global ENVIRONMENTS such as habitats, ecosystems (e.g., below 4000 m, ground water, city). 3. Species and environments have certain characteristics (traits, phenotypes) that can be

observed, measured or computed. These data parameters are summarized with QUALITY & PHENOTYPE, e.g., length, growth rate, reproduction rate. 4. Biological, chemical and physical PROCESSES are re-occurring and transform materials or organisms due to chemical reactions or other influencing factors. 5. EVENTS are processes that appear only once at a specific time, such as environmental disasters, e.g., Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Tree of the Year 2016. 6. Chemical compounds, rocks, sand and sediments can be grouped as MATERIALS & SUBSTANCES. 7. ANATOMY comprises the structure of organisms, e.g., body or plant parts, organs, cells, and genes. 8. METHOD describes all operations and experiments that have to be conducted to lead to a certain result, e.g., lidar measurements, observation, remote sensing. 9. Outcomes of research methods are delivered in DATA TYPE, e.g., DNA data or sequence data is the result of genome sequencing, lidar data is the result of lidar measurements (active remote sensing). 10. All kinds of geographic information is summarized with LOCATION, e.g., Germany, Hai- nich National Park, Atlantic Ocean, and 11. temporal data including date, date times, and geological eras are described by TIME, e.g., current, over time, Triassic. 12. PERSON & ORGANIZATION are either projects or authors of data. 13. As reflected in the search questions, scholars in biodiversity are highly interested in HUMAN INTERVENTION on landscape and environment, e.g., fishery, agriculture, and land use. PLOS ONE Dataset search in biodiversity research

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246099 March 24, 2021 9 / 36