Collaborative Information Synthesis I : A Model of Information Behaviors of Scientists in Medicine and Public Health

Scientists engage in the discovery process more than any other user population, yet their day-today activities are often elusive. One activity that consumes much of a scientist's time is developing models that balance contradictory and redundant evidence. Driven by our desire to understand the information behaviors of this important user group, and the behaviors of scientific discovery in general, we conducted an observational study of academic research scientists as they resolved different experimental results reported in the biomedical literature. This article is the first of two that reports our findings. In this article, we introduce the Collaborative Information Synthesis (CIS) model that reflects the salient information behaviors that we observed. The CIS model emerges from a rich collection of qualitative data including interviews, electronic recordings of meetings, meeting minutes, e-mail communications, and extraction worksheets. Our findings suggest that scientists provide two information constructs: a hypothesis projection and context information. They also engage in four critical tasks: retrieval, extraction, verification, and analysis. The findings also suggest that science is not an individual but rather a collaborative activity and that scientists use the results of one analysis to inform new analyses. In Part 2, we compare and contrast existing information and cognitive models that have inadvertently reported synthesis, and then provide five recommendations that will enable designers to build information systems that support the important synthesis activity. Introduction Scientists engage in the discovery process more than any other user population, yet their day-today activities are often elusive. Even a scientist who actively makes discoveries in one discipline can find the activities conducted in a related field a mystery. Regardless of their specific discipline , the role of a good scientist is to develop a model of the world that accurately explains the available evidence. The development of accurate models often requires that a scientist resolve conflicting evidence. One activity that consumes much of a scientists' time is synthesis, " the dialectic combination of thesis and antithesis into a higher stage of truth " (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 2004). This dictionary definition reflects the alternative viewpoints that often occur when multiple empirical studies explore the same phenomena. The synthesis activity results in an overall finding—a higher stage of truth— which scientists achieve by resolving conflicting evidence. Thus, the synthesis activity requires accurately weighing a body of evidence that includes contradictions (when the study results differ) and redundancies (when study results concur) that are inevitable …