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, they now must face the challenge of aggregating the information from within the retrieved documents. Our study is a first step toward both understanding this scientific integration process and developing tools to assist researchers with that process. We found that scientists actively collaborated as they refined the retrieval, extraction, and analysis phases of a process that we have called information synthesis. In this paper, we describe both our findings of their information behavior and our design and progress towards implementing a tool we call METIS (Multi-user ExTraction and Information Synthesis), which will support the collaborative, iterative, interactive information synthesis process used by public health and biomedical scientists.