Using Citation Contexts in Scholarly Papers for Research Data Search

Abstract

Research data have been increasingly published. A search function on a research data repository is crucial to improve the accessibility. Generally, the search is executed based on metadata written by the creators of the research data. However, such the metadata may not be sufficiently descriptive because there can exist features or usages that the creators did not expect. The information about features or usages generated by users might appear in citation contexts of research data in their scholarly papers. In this study, we set and discuss the hypothesis that citation contexts in scholarly papers are useful for research data search. First, we investigated whether adding citation contexts to the metadata can enrich information about the research data. Concretely, the existing metadata and the citation contexts were collected, and their overlap was examined. Furthermore, a retrieval experiment was conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the citation contexts. The results indicated the usefulness of the citation contexts in scholarly papers.