Collaborative information synthesis I: A model of information behaviors of scientists in medicine and public health

Abstract

Scientists engage in the discovery process more than any other user population, yet their day-to-day activities are often elusive. One activity that consumes much of a scientist's time is developing models that balance contradictory and redundant evidence. Driven by our desire to understand the information behaviors of this important user group, and the behaviors of scientific discovery in general, we conducted an observational study of academic research scientists as they resolved different experimental results reported in the biomedical literature. This article is the first of two that reports our findings. In this article, we introduce the Collaborative Information Synthesis (CIS) model that reflects the salient information behaviors that we observed. The CIS model emerges from a rich collection of qualitative data including interviews, electronic recordings of meetings, meeting minutes, e-mail communications, and extraction worksheets. Our findings suggest that scientists provide two information constructs: a hypothesis projection and context information. They also engage in four critical tasks: retrieval, extraction, verification, and analysis. The findings also suggest that science is not an individual but rather a collaborative activity and that scientists use the results of one analysis to inform new analyses. In Part 2, we compare and contrast existing information and cognitive models that have inadvertently reported synthesis, and then provide five recommendations that will enable designers to build information systems that support the important synthesis activity. IntroductionScientists engage in the discovery process more than any other user population, yet their day-to-day activities are often elusive. Even a scientist who actively makes discoveries in one discipline can find the activities conducted in a related field a mystery. Regardless of their specific discipline, the role of a good scientist is to develop a model of the world that accurately explains the available evidence. The development of accurate models often requires that a scientist resolve conflicting evidence.One activity that consumes much of a scientists' time is synthesis, "the dialectic combination of thesis and antithesis into a higher stage of truth" (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 2004). This dictionary definition reflects the alternative viewpoints that often occur when multiple empirical studies explore the same phenomena. The synthesis activity results in an overall finding-a higher stage of truthwhich scientists achieve by resolving conflicting evidence. Thus, the synthesis activity requires accurately weighing a body of evidence that includes contradictions (when the study results differ) and redundancies (when study results concur) that are inevitable when multiple studies explore the same natural phenomena. In this article, we consider synthesis activities that involve evidence reported in existing literature rather than synthesis activities that require additional data collection through experimentation.New te...

Collaborative Information Seeking: A Literature Review

“…While this author uses CIS, readers should be aware that there are many related and interchangeable terms in use such as collaborative information retrieval (CIR) (Fidel et al, 2000), social searching (Evans and Chi, 2008), concurrent search (Baecker, 1995), collaborative exploratory search (Pickens and Golovchinsky, 2007), co-browsing (Gerosa et al, 2004), collaborative information behavior (Reddy and Jansen, 2008;Talja and Hansen, 2006), and collaborative information synthesis (Blake and Pratt, 2006). Despite the lack of agreement on terminology, following is an attempt to examine CIS in the context of space-time and user-source-time.…”

(Re)defining Land Change Science through Synthetic Research Practices

“…Standardized study procedures, data reporting, and metadata practices across subdisciplines makes data reuse and integration more tractable [5]. Disciplinary databases, such as the sequencing database GenBank, further simplify synthesis by providing standardized data in one centralized location.…”

“…Research synthesis is used extensively in a number of scientific fields, including health sciences [5,6,7,32] and ecological sciences [12,14,15]. Within the health sciences meta-analysis in particular has had a significant impact on the transformation of research practices [32].…”

Bireyselden Ortak Bilgi Davranışına

“…Ortak bilgi davranışının, gerek farklı disiplinler tarafından çalışılması, gerekse göreli olarak yeni bir alan olması, kavramsallaştırmada farklılıklara neden olmaktadır. Farklı araştırmalarda, ortak bilgi erişimi (CIR) (Fidel, Bruce, Pejtersen, Dumais, Grudin ve Poltrock, 2000;Poltrock, Grudin, Dumais, Fidel, Bruce ve Pejtersen, 2003), ortak bilgi sentezi (Blake ve Pratt, 2006), ortak bilgi arama (Shah, 2010), ortak anlamlandırma (Paul ve Morris, 2009) vb. kavramlarının da kullanıldığını görmek mümkündür.…”