Understanding Data Retrieval Practices: A Social Informatics Perspective

Authors : Kathleen Gregory, Helena Cousijn, Paul Groth, Andrea Scharnhorst, Sally Wyatt

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 and retrieval.

The socio-technical problem of locating data for (re)use is often reduced to the technological dimension of designing data search systems. In this article, we explore how a social informatics perspective can help to better analyze the current academic discourse about data retrieval as well as to study user practices and behaviors.

We employ two methods in our analysis – bibliometrics and interviews with data seekers – and conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for designing data discovery systems.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04971

Google Scholar as a tool for discovering journal…

Google Scholar as a tool for discovering journal articles in library and information science :

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure the coverage of Google Scholar for the Library and Information Science (LIS) journal literature as identified by a list of core LIS journals from a study by Schlögl and Petschnig (2005).

Methods: We checked every article from 35 major LIS journals from the years 2004 to 2006 for availability in Google Scholar (GS). We also collected information on the type of availability—i.e., whether a certain article was available as a PDF for a fee, as a free PDF, or as a preprint.

Results: We found that only some journals are completely indexed by Google Scholar, that the ratio of versions available depends on the type of publisher, and that availability varies a lot from journal to journal. Google Scholar cannot substitute for abstracting and indexing services in that it does not cover the complete literature of the field. However, it can be used in many cases to easily find available full texts of articles already found using another tool.

Originality/value: This study differs from other Google Scholar coverage studies in that it takes into account not only whether an article is indexed in GS at all, but also the type of availability.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/16084