Are There Any Differences in Data Set Retrieval Compared to Well-Known Literature Retrieval?

Digital libraries are nowadays expected to contain more than books and articles. All relevant sources of information for a scholar should be available, including research data. However, does literature retrieval work for data sets as well? In the context of a requirement analysis of a data catalogue for quantitative Social Science research data, we tried to find answers to this question. We conducted two user studies with a total of 53 participants and found similarities and important differences in the users’ needs when searching for data sets in comparison to those already known in literature search. In particular, quantity and quality of metadata are far more important in data set search than in literature search, where convenience is most important. In this paper, we present the methodology of these two user studies, their results and challenges for data set retrieval system that can be derived thereof. One of our key findings is that for empirical social scientists, the choice of research data is more relevant than the choice of literature; therefore they are willing to put more effort into the retrieval process. Due to our choice of use case, our initial findings are limited to the field of Social Sciences. However, because of the similar characteristics for data sets also in other research areas, such as Economics, we assume that our results are applicable for them as well.