Faculty, researchers and students would probably be familiar with the search engine, Google Scholar and enjoy the simplicity and convenience of searching for scholarly publications on the platform. In recent months, Google has created a new search engine – Google Dataset Search, with a similar look and feel.
The difference is that it focuses on datasets. Google Dataset Search aggregates datasets that hosted by various sources such as a publisher’s site, a data repository or even a researcher’s personal website. Hence, this can be a great resource for researchers who wish to explore and reuse existing datasets. However, for Google Dataset Search to effectively index and include the datasets in its search results, the hosting sites would need to follow a set of guidelines for the underlying metadata for their datasets. The good news is, DR-NTU (Data) is compliant with Google’s indexing guidelines and dataset records in DR-NTU (Data) can be found in Google Dataset Search’s search results.
Given that Google Dataset Search is still in the Beta version, we can expect to see more improvements and functionalities in the future. Perhaps, data citations and their corresponding citation counts could be included in Google Scholar Profiles in time to come!
