Data Quality Issues and Content Analysis for Research Data Repositories : The Case of Dryad

Abstract

Research Object (RO) repositories extend traditional forms of scholarly communication by providing scientists the means necessary to store, share and re-use datasets generated at various stages of the research process. Yet this shift to digital publication does not guarantee that outputs, results or methods are reusable.  Data quality is absolutely vital for the dissemination, reuse and sharing of digital resources. Manual metadata quality control is practically impossible and as a result, many quality criteria, both semantically and structurally get overlooked and digital objects may become problematic. The aim of the research reported on this paper was to identify the data quality problems associated with the Dryad research data repository. In particular, three metadata elements (Creator, Date and Resource Type) were analysed and quality issues associated to these elements were identified. The paper concludes with some recommendations for improving the quality of metadata in research data repositories.