Understanding data search as a socio-technical practice

Open research data are heralded as having the potential to increase effectiveness, productivity and reproducibility in science, but little is known about the actual practices involved in data search. The socio-technical problem of locating data for reuse is often reduced to the technological dimension of designing data search systems. We combine a bibliometric study of the current academic discourse around data search with interviews with data seekers. In this article, we explore how adopting a contextual, socio-technical perspective can help to understand user practices and behaviour and ultimately help to improve the design of data discovery systems.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Journal of information science

• Publication date

  2018-01-15

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/0165551519837182arXiv 1801.04971
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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