Towards a Problem Solving Environment for Scholarly Communication Research

We explore the need for and the architecture of a Problem Solving Environment (PSE) for scholarly communication research through an examination of the problem area it addresses, the problem solving processes that scholarly communication researchers commonly employ, and the existing data sources for this type of research. As scholarly activities in many fields become increasingly heterogeneous and complex, and as information technologies become more and more powerful, research on how to better facilitate scholarly activities with these powerful technologies is also increasing. This explains why the design and implementation of Problem Solving Environments (PSEs) has become a research focus in computational science. It has been predicted that PSEs will eventually become “the main gateway” for scholars to access resources and will “change the pervading research culture, making it more open and accountable” through their support for “transparent access” to heterogeneous distributed resources and through the “seamless integration” of new software, hardware and data resources (Walker and Rana 2003, 6). Here, we explore a PSE for scholarly communication research, aiming to contribute to the study of scholarly communication, to help improve scholarly communication systems, and to advance research on PSEs. We first discuss the need for a scholarly communication research PSE, and then propose an architecture that follows naturally from the requirements derived by examining the problem area it addresses and the problem solving processes that scholarly communication researchers commonly employ. The present study is based on our experience with a large scale citation analysis study (referred to in this paper as “the example study”) that compares the scholarly communication patterns revealed from research papers published on the Web as indexed by ResearchIndex with those demonstrated in print journals as indexed by Science Citation Index (SCI) in the XML research field (Zhao 2003). 1. What is a Problem Solving Environment? Like many terms in Information Science, different people use the term PSE in different ways (Abrams et al. 2003). Although the term is hard to pin down exactly, there have been attempts at a definition. The following one, by Gallopoulos, Houstis, and Rice (1994, 11-12), appears to be the most frequently quoted in research papers on PSEs: A PSE is a computer system that provides all the computational facilities necessary to solve a target class of problems. These features include advanced solution methods, automatic or