Supporting data discovery: Comparing perspectives of support specialists and researchers

Purpose: Much of the research in data discovery is centered on the users’ viewpoint, frequently overlooking the perspective of those who develop and maintain the discovery infrastructure. Our goal is to conduct a comparative study on research data discovery, examining both support specialists’ and researchers’ views by merging new analysis with prior research insights.

Methods: This work summarizes the studies the authors have conducted over the last seven years investigating the data discovery practices of support specialists from different disciplines. Although support specialists were not the main target of some of these studies, data about their perspectives was collected. Our corpus comprises in-depth interviews with 6 social science support specialists, interviews with 19 researchers and 3 support specialists from multiple disciplines, a global survey with 1630 researchers and 47 support specialists, and a use case analysis of 25 support specialists. In the analysis section, we juxtapose the fresh insights on support specialists’ views with the already documented perspectives of researchers for a holistic understanding. The latter is primarily discussed in the literature review, with references made in the analysis section to draw comparisons.

Results: We found that support specialists’ views on data discovery are not entirely different from those of the researchers. There are, however, some differences that we have identified, most notably the interconnection of data discovery with general web search, literature search, and social networks.

Conclusion: We conclude by proposing recommendations for different types of support work to better support researchers’ data discovery practices.