Ron here. The research behavior of scientists has been studied quite extensively. I wrote a short paper on it last quarter, which I’ve attached, that summarizes the major studies. Information Seeking – Users
Through my contacts at Isis Pharmaceuticals, a drug discovery company in Carlsbad, we potentially have a novel source of data to explore. For the last five years, they’ve been using a system called the Digital Library Request Service (DLRS) to manage their scientists’ requests for article reprints. The scientists (roughly half biologists and half chemists, plus a patent staff) enter citations into a shopping cart, and the system determines which publisher to obtain the articles from at the least cost. They’ve built up an extensive order history, which I believe could be analyzed in a number of interesting ways.
My message to Frank Bennett, Senior Vice President for Research at Isis Pharmaceuticals:
Frank,
It’s been a while since we’ve talked. I’ve recently enrolled in the Library and Information Science program at UCLA, inspired in part by the work we did at Isis on DLRS. I’m doing a class this quarter on information-seeking behavior, and would like to explore the patterns of requests made by scientists for journal articles. Isis has been collecting just that sort of data in DLRS for the last few years and I’d like to see if we could discover anything interesting from it.
One question might be the extent of cross-discipline requests, that is, do biologists ask for articles from chemistry journals and vice versa, or do they stick primarily to their own discipline and to what degree. Another might be about citation-following, that is, if there is a request for an article, to what extent do subsequent requests occur in its list of citations. For either question, is there a variation by the scientist’s discipline, or by experience?
The specific information I’d like to explore in DLRS would be which journals/articles were requested by which scientists. The scientist names would be removed, but I’d like to capture some demographics about them, such as what field their degree is in, and how many years since the degree was awarded.
Of course there is privacy to be protected, and maybe corporate concerns I haven’t thought of. I’d be happy to work with Grant Bryce to ensure that all concerns are addressed. The immediate use for the data would be a class assignment, but if there were interesting results I could see it turning into a journal publication.
Do you think it would be okay to use the DLRS data for this purpose?
Dr. Bennett’s reply:
In principle I would be supportive of your extracting the information. We may need to put in place some sort of confidentiality document in case you are exposed to other information. Will check with our legal group.
I am encouraged and expect to hear back from him by early next week.
Ron
Tags: literature request, scientist
