Online research is now a mainstay of scientific analysis. Private firms who employ scientists expect their employees to use digital academic materials in their study, often subscribing to various article databases and online journals in a preemptive attempt to satisfy those information needs. Although historically scientists have preferred obtaining reference directly from their close colleagues, more and more often, scientists are using the Internet as a primary form of research. While firms endeavor to supply their researchers with accurate resources to meet their information demands, these means are often acquired before a user has an actual need. Determining a solution to a problem that does not yet exists has its obvious limitations, as no information solution is a cure all, to be slapped like a band aid on multiple kinds of wounds. In order to secure a sound course of action for particular research, the informational needs of the specific community must be examined.
Team Science proposes a research study on the information seeking behavior of particular group of scientists during their professional research. We want our investigation to illustrate how, if at all, a company’s library or digital holdings could be altered to improve both the experience of scientists working there and their inquiries. Our team has access to approximately 5 years of data from a private pharmaceutical firm, Isis Pharmaceuticals, which employs primarily biologists and chemists. The data consists of journal article requests made by individual users via the firm’s Digital Library Request Service, (DLRS). The DLRS allows scientists to search online databases for citations of articles they would like to retrieve. Once selected those article are placed in a digital shopping cart, and the system is able to determine where to purchase the article at a minimum cost to the firm. This data allows us to see what journals were requested simultaneously by a user, as well as which users ordered what over any given period within the past 5 years. For the sake of anonymity, no user will be identified by their name but rather by an assigned number.
The user’s request history will be analyzed year by year , as well as in correlation with some demographic information, such as; education level, field of study, their length of time in their current field, any society affiliation, their country of origin, and gender. The questions we will investigate are; which journals are most requested overall, which requests are for current and past issues, what is the proportion of traditional vs. open-source publishing requests, are there periods of higher volume of requests, and are initial requests for articles followed up by requests for articles cited in the initial one. This analysis will allow a more detailed view of the specific information needs of these scientists, how the current system meets those needs, and how the system could either be updated to fill in the informational gaps or to make retrieval more efficient.
