ASIST2006: How Chemists are Really Finding and Using Information in Our Digital Environment

How Chemists are Really Finding and Using Information in Our Digital Environment
(SIG/USE)

Using Citation Analysis to Inform Library Collection Development in Support of Scientific Faculty Research
E. Ashley Brown

Looking at local citation information based on ISI’s LJUR. Also, looking at what years the scientists are citing – in this case the universities are citing older articles so should probably subscribe to the backfile.

(the Lancaster book, I can’t seem to link to, actually recommends (and my prof Kaske seems to concur) the use of a composite metric where various measures are weighted so global and local, times in house used, downloads, etc)

(also the standard for download information is COUNTER)
****To be fair, ACS IS counter compliant http://pubs.acs.org/4librarians/usage/index.html ****

Does Electronic Availability Enhance Use of Chemistry Information
Cecelia Brown

Looked at how chemists interact with web information as evidenced by their articles published in the literature. Selected key ACS journals from various subfields of chemistry (but not medicine) – ACS bcs online from v1 n1.

Looked at the full text articles and the citations to find web pages. Yes, biochem, chemical reviews, especially. ACS supporting materials web site. They are referring to Genbank, BLAST, URLs. 23% of URLs were in the experimental section.

Are online accesses to articles correlated with citation rate?
Does purpose or content relate to citation and/or access levels?
-many of most heavily cited/accessed are methods based

See image of conclusions slide.

Information Use Surrounding the Discovery Processes of Chemists and Chemical Engineers
Catherine Blake
Discovery in the sense of a new idea (not just retrieving literature).
Model the day to day processes of scientists
Key questions
What is their definition of discovery
How do they arrive at their research question
How do they transition ideas to publication

Semi-structured interviews
Critical incident technique

Card sorting for workflow – transcribed descriptions as it was done, frequencies of occurences
Taped and transcribed 25/27 interviews
Analyzed with Nvivo, bottom up theme identification.

What is discovery?
1) New/novel
2) Builds on other work
3) Has practical application (more from the engineers)
4) Balance experimentation and theory
5) Simplicity

Arriving at a research question
1) Discussion
2) Previous research projects
3) Combining expertise
4) Reading the literature

Overall
26 process diagrams
Literature-related cards – they read, download, and deal heavily with literature

System design implications from discovery-
One is to describe and justify new discoveries (would it help to use the structured abstracts?)

Implications from research question-
Integrate collaborative and communication tools as well as access to previous literature

Invitation to participate in future work in LIS about coming up with research questions
http://www.ils.unc.edu/DS

asist2006