Establishing the expertise for rare diseases started in the Netherlands by an inventory on existing expertise in 500 rare diseases at the Dutch Medical University Centres. The outcome of this survey was a vast list of persons with special knowledge of one or several of these rare diseases. The Dutch Steering Committee on Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs concluded that differentiation within this ...

Although the scientific peer review process is crucial to distributing research investments, little has been reported about the decision-making processes used by reviewers. One key attribute likely to be important for decision-making is reviewer expertise. Recent data from an experimental blinded review utilizing a direct measure of expertise has found that closer intellectual distances between...

We measure the contextual dependence of expertise by observing experts perform a task conceptually identical to—but contextually distinct from—the task in which they are experienced. We find that these experts fail to apply their expertise in the decontextualized environment, indicating that unfamiliarity restricts the portability of expertise. However, we also find that the experts improve wit...

This research indicates how information retrieval activity is a social process helping to create a network of organizational expertise. After describing knowledge management practices in a research and development laboratory we propose a four steps model: Research, Support, Negotiation, and Reification. Built upon information research activities, this model either triggers an epistemic negotiat...

Making accurate predictions about what may happen in the environment requires analogies between perceptual input and associations in memory. These elements of predictions are based on cortical representations, but little is known about how these processes can be enhanced by experience and training. On the other hand, studies on perceptual expertise have revealed that the acquisition of expertis...

Previous research on scientific reasoning has shown that it involves a diverse set of skills. Yet, little is known about generality or domain specificity of those skills, an important issue in theories of expertise and in attempts to automate scientific reasoning skills. We present a study designed to test what kinds of skills psychologists actually use in designing and interpreting experiments...