Trends in Data Submissions at a Social Science Data Archive

In recent years, new data sharing policies in the US have encouraged scientists to share research data with others, many accomplishing this through archiving their data with a domain repository. Related to this trend, there is strong demand from social scientists for access to research data for a variety of secondary data analysis uses including: support of new grant applications, in classrooms for research papers, and to be used in research projects that lead to conference presentations and publications. Given that many users search for a potential secondary data through Google or through the search feature of data repository, it is possible to create and mine a database for emerging patterns in search behavior that help us better understand the demand for data and how well a domain repository is able to meet that demand. We explore data from the 100 most frequently searched keywords/phrases at ICPSR in 2014. We match these popular terms to the depth of the ICPSR holdings related to these search to determine areas where ICPSR may be lacking data. We also identify common search terms where the users exit the ICPSR web site after searching for data. We find, for example, "demoralization" was searched for 323 times in 2014 and 94% of users exited the ICPSR web site after results from the search were returned. Looking forward, ICPSR expects the number of scientists wanting access to research data collected by others to increase and this user search model may provide a greater understanding of data user needs.