Abstract
Secondary analysis or the reuse of existing survey data is a common practice among social scientists. Searching for relevant datasets in Digital Libraries is a somehow unfamiliar behaviour for this community. Dataset retrieval, especially in the social sciences, incorporates additional material such as codebooks, questionnaires, raw data files and more. Our assumption is that due to the diverse nature of datasets, document retrieval models often do not work as efficiently for retrieving datasets. One way of enhancing these types of searches is to incorporate the users’ interaction context in order to personalise dataset retrieval sessions. As a first step towards this long term goal, we study characteristics of dataset retrieval sessions from a real-life Digital Library for the social sciences that incorporates both: research data and publications. Previous studies reported a way of discerning queries between document search and dataset search by query length. In this paper, we argue the claim and report our findings of an indistinguishability of queries, whether aiming for a dataset or a document. Amongst others, we report our findings of dataset retrieval sessions with respect to query characteristics, interaction sequences and topical drift within 65,000 unique sessions.
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Notes
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- 2.
The words (document, publication) and (dataset, research data) are used interchangeably in the rest of the paper to imply the same concept.
- 3.
Accessible via: https://search.gesis.org. See details in [6].
- 4.
Character count is used considering the linguistics of German language; the queries submitted to the ISS are mixed, some in German and others in English.
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- 6.
A high-resolution figure is available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.02770.
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Acknowledgement
This work was funded by DFG under grant MA 3964/10-1, the “Establishing Contextual Dataset Retrieval - transferring concepts from document to dataset retrieval” (ConDATA) project, http://bit.ly/Condata.
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Carevic, Z., Roy, D., Mayr, P. (2020). Characteristics of Dataset Retrieval Sessions: Experiences from a Real-Life Digital Library. In: Hall, M., Merčun, T., Risse, T., Duchateau, F. (eds) Digital Libraries for Open Knowledge. TPDL 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12246. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54956-5_14
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