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

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, as well as personas that act as research software discoverers. We then categorize various discovery pathways for research software and analyze them according to relevant search criteria. Our results show many different discovery scenarios, a very heterogeneous landscape of discovery pathways and a lack of metadata and filtering options.