Laura Sheble

Synthesis centers as critical research infrastructure

Abstract Synthesis centers offer a unique amalgam of culture, infrastructure, leadership, and support that facilitates creative discovery on issues crucial to science and society. The combination of logistical support, postdoctoral or senior fellowships, complex data management, informatics and computing capability or expertise, and most of all, opportunity for group discussion and reflection lowers the “activation energy” necessary to promote creativity and the cross‐fertilization of ideas. Synthesis centers are explicitly created and operated as community‐oriented infrastructure, with scholarly directions driven by the ever‐changing interests and needs of an open and inclusive scientific community. The last decade has seen a rise in the number of synthesis centers globally but also the end of core federal funding for several, challenging the sustainability of the infrastructure for this key research strategy. Here, we present the history and rationale for supporting synthesis centers, integrate insights arising from two decades of experience, and explore the challenges and opportunities for long‐term sustainability.

Blogger perceptions on digital preservation

Blogs have emerged as valuable records of current social and political events. In response, calls in the literature have advocated that these new vehicles of communication and information dissemination are valuable additions to the human record worthy of stewardship [1,2,3]. The intent of this research is to study the requirements and feasibility of impacting stewardship of blogs at the level of creation. This will be accomplished by surveying blogger perceptions on digital preservation. Expected outcomes of this study include the development of a framework for constructing a digital preservation program for blogs. A survey will be administered to bloggers to assess perceptions of digital preservation issues as related to their own blogging activities and the blogosphere in general. The instrument is organized into five categories: demographics, awareness, appraisal, impact, and investment. Participants will be recruited through established contacts in the blogging community, with the intent of a resulting snowball effect for gathering additional participation. The demographics section collects basic characteristics of respondents, characteristics of their blogs (e.g., topic areas, platforms, linkages, content types, permissions for reuse), and their blogging practices (e.g., motivations, frequency of updates). The awareness section surveys current preservation-related activities performed by bloggers such as measures taken to ensure duplication of blog content; and whether, why, and how bloggers engage in practices that result in post-publication content changes. The appraisal section assesses perceptions of issues related to persistent storage and access. Respondents are asked to evaluate the importance of researcher-supplied blog characteristics that could be used to appraise blogs and their components. These characteristics include social and cultural factors such as perceived blog popularity, social linkages, and artifactual significance as well as structural components and content types. In addition to seeking clarification of the types and components of blogs that are perceived to be important with respect to preservation, the appraisal section addresses issues related to content ownership. The impact section focuses on the perceived importance of blogs to authors, preserving access to blogs, and blogs as a part of the human record. In the investment section, respondents are asked to quantify resources that they would be willing to expend to preserve their own blogs and their willingness to extend these expenditures to the blogs of others. Data collection will begin April 2007 and continue for one month. Following closure of the survey, data will be analyzed using descriptive statistics and qualitative evaluation methods. An initial assessment report will include a summary analysis of results and initial calls for recommendations. Future works include further development of these recommendations, development of benchmarks for planning ingest of blogs into a repository system, and the design and pilot testing of a user interface for deposit, storage, and access. This research is intended to promote digital preservation activities for continued access to blogs and to raise awareness of digital preservation issues among a population of users removed from the walls of academia and research. Bloggers constitute a significant producer type in that they have produced culturally and socially significant works, including those that contribute to wider public discourse. Furthermore, bloggers have the potential to become significant contributors to the dissemination of preservation awareness because they are vital actors in networks of communities that often span the borders of institutional, commercial, grassroots and personal communications.

Impact of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network: Accelerating the Translation of Research Into Practice

The Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network (CPCRN) is a thematic network dedicated to accelerating the adoption of evidence-based cancer prevention and control practices in communities by advancing dissemination and implementation science. Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Cancer Institute, CPCRN has operated at two levels: Each participating network center conducts research projects with primarily local partners as well as multicenter collaborative research projects with state and national partners. Through multicenter collaboration, thematic networks leverage the expertise, resources, and partnerships of participating centers to conduct research projects collectively that might not be feasible individually. Although multicenter collaboration is often advocated, it is challenging to promote and assess. Using bibliometric network analysis and other graphical methods, this paper describes CPCRNs multicenter publication progression from 2004 to 2014. Searching PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science in 2014 identified 249 peer-reviewed CPCRN publications involving two or more centers out of 6,534 total. The research and public health impact of these multicenter collaborative projects initiated by CPCRN during that 10-year period were then examined. CPCRN established numerous workgroups around topics such as: 2-1-1, training and technical assistance, colorectal cancer control, federally qualified health centers, cancer survivorship, and human papillomavirus. This paper discusses the challenges that arise in promoting multicenter collaboration and the strategies that CPCRN uses to address those challenges. The lessons learned should broadly interest those seeking to promote multisite collaboration to address public health problems, such as cancer prevention and control.

Personal pregnancy health records (PregHeR): Facets to interface design

Interest and research in personal health record (PHR) systems has recently increased, leading to the availability of a variety of PHR systems on the market that target everyone from the general public to disease-specific patient groups. Few studies, have dealt with PHR needs of families. No studies have specifically targeted pregnant women regarding PHR systems design despite increased interest in health matters exhibited by pregnant women. In this project, we first developed five facets - Appointment, Diary, Health Data, Finance, and Resources - of personal health information organization and management. We then incorporated two time visualization tools - calendars and timelines - to provide access to information based on time and content. The Agileviews framework of Marchionini, Geisler and Brunk was adapted to structure agile, multiple point access to information in the interface designs. The result is three distinct interface prototypes of the PregHeR system: Calendar View, Timeline I, and Timeline II. This project adds to current research in PHR systems design through the organization of information into content-based facets and by emphasizing personal user needs in the design of personal health record systems interfaces.

Greenstone in practice: Implementations of an open source digital library system

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive, open-source system for constructing, presenting, and maintaining digital collections. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is widely used internationally, and collections exist in many of the worlds languages. Greenstone runs under Unix, Windows and Mac (OS/X) and is issued under the GNU general public license. Selecting and implementing Greenstone helped many digital library practitioners build comprehensive and flexible digital collections at relatively low cost, and allowed them to tailor the software for local environments and organizational needs. The panel, consisting of Greenstone developer and implementers, will introduce Greenstone software and demonstrate installation and collection building, present customized Greenstone user interfaces, discuss technical and organizational aspects of Greenstone implementations at their organizations, report the results of the 2004 Greenstone User Survey, which focused on support mechanisms, as well as the characteristics of organizations implementing Greenstone, their audiences and system needs.

Macro‐level diffusion of a methodological knowledge innovation: Research synthesis methods, 1972–2011

Use of research synthesis methods has contributed to changes in research practices. In disciplinary literatures, authors indicate motivations to use the methods include needs to (a) translate research‐based knowledge to inform practice and policy decisions, and (b) integrate relatively large and diverse knowledge bases to increase the generality of results and yield novel insights or explanations. This review presents two histories of the diffusion of research synthesis methods: a narrative history based primarily in the health and social sciences; and a bibliometric overview across science broadly. Engagement with research synthesis was strongly correlated with evidence‐based practice (EBP), and moderately with review prevalence. The social sciences were most diverse in terms of when research synthesis was adopted. Technology, physical sciences, and math appear to be relatively resistant though fields such as physics may be considered to have used similar methods long ago. Additional research is needed to assess the consequences of adoption within fields, including changes in how researchers engage with knowledge resources. This review demonstrates that particularistic histories of science and technology may be fruitfully augmented with informetrics to examine how disciplinary diffusion narratives coincide with patterns across science more broadly, thereby opening up disciplinary knowledge to inform future research.

Research synthesis methods and library and information science: Shared problems, limited diffusion

Interests of researchers who engage with research synthesis methods (RSM) intersect with library and information science (LIS) research and practice. This intersection is described by a summary of conceptualizations of research synthesis in a diverse set of research fields and in the context of Swansons (1986) discussion of undiscovered public knowledge. Through a selective literature review, research topics that intersect with LIS and RSM are outlined. Topics identified include open access, information retrieval, bias and research information ethics, referencing practices, citation patterns, and data science. Subsequently, bibliometrics and topic modeling are used to present a systematic overview of the visibility of RSM in LIS. This analysis indicates that RSM became visible in LIS in the 1980s. Overall, LIS research has drawn substantially from general and internal medicine, the fields own literature, and business; and is drawn on by health and medical sciences, computing, and business. Through this analytical overview, it is confirmed that research synthesis is more visible in the health and medical literature in LIS; but suggests that, LIS, as a meta‐science, has the potential to make substantive contributions to a broader variety of fields in the context of topics related to research synthesis methods.

The persistence and peril of misinformation: Defining what truth means and deciphering how human brains verify information are some of the challenges to battling widespread falsehoods

Misinformation—both deliberately promoted and accidentally shared—is perhaps an inevitable part of the world in which we live, but it is not a new problem. People likely have lied to one another for roughly as long as verbal communication has existed. Deceiving others can offer an apparent opportunity to gain strategic advantage, to motivate others to action, or even to protect interpersonal bonds. Moreover, people inadvertently have been sharing inaccurate information with one another for thousands of years. However, we currently live in an era in which technology enables information to reach large audiences distributed across the globe, and thus the potential for immediate and widespread effects from misinformation now looms larger than in the past. Yet in those same patterns of mass communication and the facilitated spread of information among people might also be the means to correct misinformation over time.

Changing approaches to research synthesis affect social and intellectual structures of science

Research synthesis methods, like collaboration and interdisciplinary research, comprise practices through which scholarly and scientific knowledge is integrated. The methods, which include meta‐analysis and integrative or systematic review, are also arguably one of the most important contemporary methodological innovations in many social, medical, health, and perhaps other sciences. As an innovative research practice, research synthesis, like many innovations, may be associated with complex or unexpected consequences as it diffuses through the research system. This study examines the extent to which the diffusion of research synthesis methods has affected levels of collaboration and research use through comparison with literature reviews in five fields. In Social Work and Information and Library Science, more authors contributed to research syntheses than reviews. There was no difference in number of authors in the biological sciences examined: two to four authors typically contributed to both reviews and syntheses. Research syntheses were used more than reviews in Conservation Biology and Womens Studies. In Social Work, research syntheses and reviews were cited at similar levels, but production of reviews decreased as syntheses increased, suggesting that research synthesis was becoming the predominant approach to review, while traditional reviews remained valuable to researchers though in an increasingly narrow range of contexts. In Information and Library Science, research reviews were used more than research syntheses, and trends suggest that research reviews are a relatively rare but highly prized – or at least frequently used – resource. No difference was found between use of research syntheses and reviews in Evolutionary Biology. Future research should investigate relationships between different approaches to knowledge integration in the context of science fields, which would lead to a better understanding of integration, or synthesis, in science overall.

Contexts of Diffusion: Adoption of Research Synthesis in Social Work and Women’s Studies

Texts reveal the subjects of interest in research fields, and the values, beliefs, and practices of researchers. In this study, texts are examined through bibliometric mapping and topic modeling to provide a birds eye view of the social dynamics associated with the diffusion of research synthesis methods in the contexts of Social Work and Womens Studies. Research synthesis texts are especially revealing because the methods, which include meta-analysis and systematic review, are reliant on the availability of past research and data, sometimes idealized as objective, egalitarian approaches to research evaluation, fundamentally tied to past research practices, and performed with the goal informing future research and practice. This study highlights the co-influence of past and subsequent research within research fields; illustrates dynamics of the diffusion process; and provides insight into the cultural contexts of research in Social Work and Womens Studies. This study suggests the potential to further develop bibliometric mapping and topic modeling techniques to inform research problem selection and resource allocation.