As promised, at the end of the trip I wound back up at Beijing University with the remaining test participants. They were three graduate students, one first year (male), one second year (female), and one fourth year (male).
We met in the break room. After I contacted all three to reschedule, they asked if we could meet as a group, to reduce some of the pressure they felt conducting the interview in English. Security had become very tight in Beijing while we were traveling, and some of the pressure was just going through the process of signing us in with the police.
The three depended a lot on each other to translate certain sentiments, but for the most part, all three has high level of English reading competency. The first year student spoke English the least, the fourth year spoke the best. I had arrived with my husband, James, a native Chinese, and one year old son. Chatting with James and playing with the baby further diffused the tension and we spent the first 15 minutes chatting.
The break room was a small room about the size of a typical ACS office. About 18 students share this work space in addition to classrooms and several labs. The break room had several computer work stations, a washing machine for lab clothes, lockers and a printer.
All had studied chemistry in high school and once they passed the college entrance exams, they applied to the top universities. The 4th year student took his first chemistry class in 9th grade. He had a very good chemistry teacher who presented interesting experiments that captured the students attention. The first year student got into chemistry either as assigned by the Chinese education system, but seemed to be the most enthusiastic. The second year student was interested in chemistry initially, but working inthe lab turned out to be "smellier" than she thought, and has lost some enthusuasm. They agreed that in this lab, she is the one who usually does the most Internet research.
All three were fairly enthusiastic about their work. They all said they enjoy finding new methodologies, and talked about research as writing a story. "Finding a new reaction is wonderful."
They also confirmed the concept at Beijing University of there being a fee to get an Internet connection. It is 10RMB/month for domestic connections and 100RMB/month for international connections, unless itspart of the university research vendor package, then the connection to international sites is free.
All three work for the same professor in the lab, and the working model is basically the same as US universities. They are well versed in the professor's research direction, understand what he is looking for and take basic direction to make discoveries. They determine the methodology and report back the findings to the professor. Any problems in the research is basically up to them to resolve. Even though that is the case, they rarely look outside their university setting for other experts. The four year student said he sometimes has written to other researchers from the email on their article, but usually does not get a response.
When he has approached other lead researchers, he found they usually do not know the details of the research in the article. They were not the ones who did the work--it was a research assistant or grad. student like himself, and someone he would not have access to.
All three grad students are given stipends and do not pay tuition. They work 6 days/week and are off on Sunday. (This is not unusual in China.) Saturdays are reserved for seminars where one student will present a paper they found while doing research that would be interesting to the whole group.
Mobile devices
All three had cell phones but all use them for phone calls only. Text or web access is too expensive. They do participate in some oneline ne, like QQ, Skype, MSN
Familiarity with ACS
All three students were very familiar with ASAP articles and knew exactly what it stands for and what the concept is. The were not aware of the alerts and had no familiarity with RSS feeds. They habitually went to the site to check for updates each time they worked on the computer (usually 1-2 hours/computer).
They were less familiar with ACS, the professional society. They had a vague understanding of what ACS does in terms of national meeting venues and publications, but not at all about paying to join for other benefits, or networking potential.
Translation
When asked if translation was something they ever used on other sites, all three said they had never used a translation tool. If there was an option on any web site to translate to Chinese, they
typically did so. The four year student thought translating the manuscript process would be most beneficial. He had taken part in publishing at ACS before and was familiar with the process.
He agreed that is was generally the same at most publishers, but having the instructions and requirements translated into Chinese would remove a layer of doubt then submitting. The other two thought translating basic About Us pages would be most useful, especially when it came to understanding what ACS was in detail.
ACS Pubs
When we looked at ACS Pubs site specifically, they all said they downloaded the PDF as a matter of habit. When asked what would make it more useful, they all mentioned having links out to other papers would be useful. We looked at the HTML versions on both the old site and the newly designed pages (ACSNano) and they saw some elements of what they were missing out on. They were very excited to explore a little more, esp. the new ways to sort information. The more articles by this author" link were esp. intriguing, although they were somewhat disappointed to learn that the list would produce ACS publications only. They hoped for a broader search.
All three were highly complimentary of ACS search. They compared it to Wiley's search, which is difficult to search by author or journal title. They mentioned that they were often confused by the author search field, and didn't know what format to put it in. I asked if a help button would be helpful. They agreed it would. I asked where they would look for help, and they said on the side near the field label, which is, in fact, where it is. When we opened the search help window, the first year student said he had looked at this once before, but did not take the time to go through it. He thought having the text on the same page as the search would be easier when typing it in.
When asked if training would be useful, they thought training for the new ACS Publications pages might be useful, esp. if there are going to be big changes. They liked the layout of the new design but commented that they thought they would need to spend time getting used to the new layout. They also thought training in search specifically would be useful, on site, and in Chinese.
Last, I showed them the JACS Beta pages. They had not seen it, but were very excited to see ways they might be able to use this to reach out to others. The four year student had heard other students use it, the ppt templates in particular, and he was excited to use them as well.
