This project is designed to elicit data discovery contexts from researchers across Australia’s research system. As Australia’s leading research data coordinating agency, the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has identified a need for a greater understanding of the contexts around which data users approach their data discovery journey. Specifically, the study has been designed to answer the following research questions:

• How do researchers approach data discovery?
• How do researchers search for data?
• What data attributes matter to researchers’ data search?
• What criteria do researchers apply for assessing relevance and usability of datasets?
• What are the contexts of data reuse by researchers?

This study adopted a mixed-method approach to answer the proposed research questions by using both survey and in-depth interview methods. A pre-interview survey was designed to capture participant background information, including; their research areas/topics, stage of career, job roles and their data sources in recent projects. The researchers designed the interview protocol along each step of the data lifecycle and adopted a critical incident technique (CIT) protocol to conduct semi-structured in-depth interviews to elicit the contexts of data discovery.