Collaborative Information Synthesis

As the quantity of scientific literature continues to soar, scientists struggle to keep up with new findings, even in narrow areas of expertise. Although advances in information retrieval have eased the task of finding relevant articles, scientists now must face the challenge of aggregating information from within the retrieved set of documents. Our study explores the user behavior and information requirements of scientists as they interact with medical literature to answer research questions. We found that although their information needs were clearly defined, they still refined the retrieval, extraction, and analysis phases of a process that we have called information synthesis. We also found that they actively collaborated throughout the process. We describe their behavior and introduce our design and progress towards our tool METIS (Multi-user ExTraction and Information Synthesis) that will support the collaborative information synthesis process used by public health and biomedical scientists.