Seek and You Shall Find - Or Not! Why Can't We Find the Research Software We Really Need?

Abstract

Research software plays a pivotal role in today's research, whether as a result or as a facilitator of research processes. Therefore, it is very important for researchers to find suitable research software for their research project. We develop scenarios for searching research software in this paper, as well as personas that act as research software discoverers. We then categorize various discovery pathways for research software and analyzed them according to relevant search criteria. Our results show a very heterogeneous landscape of discovery pathways and a lack of metadata and filtering options.