We were fortunate enough to attend the session on how chemists find information, moderated by Carol Tenopir. Three papers were presented: first was a proposal for a new way to calculate citations and replace the oft-criticized impact factor (a la ISI); the second was a presentation of a data gathering tool to analyze the workflows of chemists; the third was an analysis of chemists who find their research online and citations of other online sources.
I have to say the second one was what really got me excited. The presenter, Catherine Blake, helped develop a software similar to a card sort exercise, in which chemists can drag-and-drop their activities into a list. It is meant to illustrate the process through which chemists identify their research question, do the research, perform the experiments, and report the findings.
Catherine then analyzes the data and creates a Markov model to illustrate the workflow
Gives me shivers just thinking about it. Short of actually going out into the field and doing ethnographic research, this could collect the information we need to help give us an idea of what our members do all day. I spoke to Catherine after the session about using the software. It is currently in IRB review at UNC, but she agreed to let me know when it is available for us to use in our tests, and possibly collaberate in future research.
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