Researchers across disciplines are sharing their data more and more, whether because of journal or funder mandates, or simply because they personally prefer the openness to increase discoverability and reuse of their data. This sharing has resulted in millions of datasets described or deposited in various locations across the web, including general or discipline-specific data repositories, publisher sites, data journals, authors’ home pages, or institutional data catalogs such as the Pitt Data Catalog (for more information see the catalog’s about page).
In early September 2018, Google launched a beta dataset search to enable users to find datasets, no matter their location, through a familiar interface and simple keyword search.
Because the Pitt Data Catalog uses structured data to describe the data included, records from the catalog are retrieved in Google’s search (as shown below), increasing the visibility of research and potentially the number of views and citations of associated publications.
If you have datasets you would like to have described in the Pitt Data Catalog, please contact the HSLS Data Services team at HSLSDATA@pitt.edu or through our dataset inclusion form.
~Melissa Ratajeski