Forschungsdaten in der Chemie

The aim of the present study is to examine the current status of several aspects of research data management in the departments of chemistry at North Rhine-Westphalian universities. A quantitative online survey has been conducted. Due to the unknown population of the participants, no validated statements can be made, but it is possible to derive very clear trends. The survey focused on finding, structuring, sharing and publishing research data. Among other things, it was examined how common the electronic lab notebooks really are. The reusability and comprehensibility of data from the perspective of the researchers were also tangented. In the questions of finding and structuring, researchers were asked to name their common used metadata. These metadata were clustered and evaluated according to the EVA principle, showing that the most important metadata of the participants is the date. Another significant result was that most researchers did not know the FAIR principles. Overall, it became clear that chemistry has still a long way to go for FAIR research data management.