Searching Data: A Review of Observational Data Retrieval Practices

As the terms “data” and “search” are ubiquitous in academic literature, title searches also were employed and combined with the controlled vocabulary of the database to locate relevant information. Searches in Scopus included strings such as: KEY ( user AND information ) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ("research data" OR ( scien* W/1 data ) OR ( data W/1 ( repositor* OR archive* ) ) ) TITLE ( data W/0 ( search OR retriev* OR discover* OR access* OR sharing OR reus* ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( EXACTKEYWORD , "Information Retrieval" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( EXACTKEYWORD , "Data Retrieval" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( EXACTKEYWORD , "Data Reuse" ) ) Bibliometric techniques such as citation chaining and related records were also applied.

Pertinent journals and conference proceedings not indexed within Scopus (e.g. the International Journal of Digital Curation) were searched directly using similar keywords. The approximately 400 retrieved documents were examined by close reading to identify articles referring to observational data for inclusion in the final dataset. Acknowledgements This work has funded by the NWO Grant 652.001.002 (programme Creative Industrie - Thematisch Onderzoek (CI-TO), Re-SEARCH: Contextual Search for Scientific Research Data)