Research Collaboration Tools: A Resource Guide for Medical Librarians

Abstract

As medical research becomes an increasingly complex process that often includes some form of collaboration, a number of online tools have emerged to help meet this need. This column aims to search broadly across a number of these resources and organize the findings into a list of examples tailored to the interests of medical librarians. Specific attention is paid to organizing resources into broad categories and examining why they may be of importance to libraries. A few detailed examples of tools currently in use are also provided.

KEYWORDS:

• cooperative behavior
• Internet
• research
• research personnel

INTRODUCTION

In the past few years, scientific and medical research has become an increasingly complex process that has seen a growing interest in collaboration. Because of this, a number of resources have emerged to help facilitate collaboration between researchers (1–11). What tools, then, are available to help in the tasks of finding collaborators, carrying out work, or sharing information and expertise?

Prior research has examined collaborative projects and supporting technologies, including examples such as a 5-year review conducted by Bos et al. that produced a taxonomy of collaboration types as well as an extensive list of projects spanning a number of scientific disciplines (12). Building on such examples, the goal here was to search across a number of collaborative tools that focus on scientific, and in particular, medical research and report back on a small set of examples of likely interest to health sciences or hospital librarians.

METHODS

Databases consulted during research included EBSCO's LISTA, PubMed, and Ovid MEDLINE. Criteria for deciding if a resource would be reviewed included that an online element be critical to the tool's success or being; that there be a scientific, clinical, or medical research concentration; and that the tool must be applicable to the likely interests of medical librarians. Thought was also given to features that address security and reliability, novel design features, and signs of recent and ongoing use.

RESULTS

As resources were evaluated, a number of informal categories began to emerge based on the primary purposes or distinguishing features of the examples, including social networking and expertise locating systems, web-based communities, virtual research environments, and, finally, collaborative publishing applications and reference-sharing networks. It should be noted that not all resources fit neatly into one category and may have overlapping features. In the sections that follow, an outline will define these categories and categorize resources by their most distinguishing characteristics, as well as describe some major relevance factors. A list of several select examples will then follow.

SOCIAL NETWORKING AND EXPERTISE LOCATING SYSTEMS

What Are They?

This category includes online tools designed to assist in locating collaborating researchers (expertise) and professional networking. Also included are resources intended for tracking research and funding opportunities.

Why Do They Matter?

As noted before, scientific and biomedical research has become increasingly interdisciplinary and complex, and locating appropriate collaborators is becoming an important factor in project success (11). A number of online tools are available that can facilitate finding or networking with potential collaborators, including some with services intended to support the specific needs of science and medical researchers.

For example, in a study by Schleyer et al., where researchers detailed the design of Digital Vita, a system currently in its early production stages at the University of Pittsburgh, certain services were implemented to help facilitate the establishment of collaborations, including (a) a process for maintaining and formatting biographical information that makes use of imported data from sources such as Medline and semi-automated updates sent across member profiles relative to shared projects, such as co-authorship; (b) a powerful search interface that makes use of the relationship networks and connections between profiles; and (c) the ability to build and maintain social networks, including managing biographical document flow between colleagues (11).

While a number of services exist and system features vary, the list below includes a set of examples designed for researchers who medical librarians are likely to serve within their patron community. It should be noted that in addition to providing a list of examples, the set below is intended illustrate the use of data and supporting services within these tools.

What are Some Examples?

• SciLink (http://www.scilink.com)

  Launched in 2007, SciLink is a free networking community that focuses on science researchers. SciLink profiles include resume and biographical information as entered by users, as well as automated updates from Web-based data and literature that create network relationships, such as publications and coauthors. Interesting features include the “Tree of Science,” which displays career relationships among researchers; an application that exports profiles into the NIH Biosketch format; event postings and attendee information; access to news, videos, and job links; and a new citation manager application.

• Epernicus (http://www.epernicus.com)

  Epernicus is a professional networking and expertise locator for current and former research scientists. User accounts are free, but require registration upon which one answers questions about his or her research area and institution. Detailed information within Epernicus profiles creates automatic network connections formed by shared expertise, methods, or institutional relationships. Epernicus also provides private networking platforms available to individual institutions through their Epernicus Solutions services. More details are available from their Web site's About Us section, which also features an introduction video.

• RefWorks-COS Research Support Suite (http://www.cos.com/) and (http://www.csa.com)

  This subscription-based product is actually a suite of tools designed to provide support throughout the entire research process. Available from ProQuest, the suite is made up of some very familiar products from the former Community of Science, including COS Expertise and COS Funding Opportunities, as well as a few new additions currently available on the CSA Illumina platform. Newer products include COS Scholar Universe, a database of more than 2 million researcher profiles that are updated editorially through a process involving data from several different research databases; PapersInvited, a database of calls for papers issued for upcoming conferences and specialty journal issues; and a new search interface for the longstanding COS Funding Opportunities. With ProQuest's recent acquisition of RefWorks, the suite additionally expands to cover reference management needs and the collaborative features of RefShare. The utilities that make up the suite are integrated in several aspects as well, including COS Expertise updates that filter to Scholar Universe and a RefWorks author resolver that provides links from citations to Scholar Universe profiles.

• ResearchCrossroads (http://www.researchcrossroads.org)

  Designed to provide transparent access to publicly funded research, ResearchCrossroads aggregates funding, publication, clinical trial, and grant data from government and private research agencies. According to the site's founder, over three million grants, 500,000 researcher profiles, and 50,000 organization profiles are currently in the system. Profiles are based on publicly available data, but researchers may also login to update their own information—with about 12,000 profiles being updated this way to date. Researchers can use the service to maintain a public profile and search for other researcher or organizational profiles, as well as search for funding awards, opportunities, and clinical trials. “Crossroads” are presorted data sets on scientific topics (e.g., Immunology or Wound Healing) that allow users to tab across funding history, researchers in the field, and grant awards—as well as register for updates. Membership is open to individuals and institutions and is free if the use is for noncommercial purposes. Future plans for ResearchCrossroads include exploring possibilities for graphically representing funding portfolios and continued efforts to supply NLM Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) tags to support searching and graphing.

WEB-BASED COMMUNITIES

What Are They?

This category includes online platforms that allow researchers to share knowledge and function as a hub for finding community-relevant information, news, and developments. Also included are tools developed to encourage conversation and collaboration between health care professionals.

Why Do They Matter?

The internet is a major medium through which researchers share knowledge, and in health care and biomedical research where many online communities already exist, the Web has become especially important (13). In some cases, such as SOMWeb, an online community of practice created for the Swedish Oral Medicine Network, these communities offer members the opportunity to submit cases and seek advice on diagnosis or treatment, to show unusual cases, or to create discussion (10). In other cases, such as Alzforum (to be discussed later), communities are a means to help researchers manage new findings when rapid developments become common in a given field (8).

One interesting development within some channels has been the adoption of semantic web technologies to create content capable of being automatically processed and even shared or reused between communities. For example, as Das et al. explain in their work detailing the Science Collaboration Framework (SCF), Web-based communities are becoming an increasingly popular vehicle for sharing information, but “information organization and exchange in such communities is usually unstructured, rendering interoperability between communities difficult.” The SCF, currently used in examples such as StemBook (discussed later) and PD Online Research (2, 14), is a software toolkit designed to help establish Web-based biomedical research communities and annotate the discourse, publications, and news published within these resources with terms and identifiers from semantic information resources (2, 15).

A number of Web-based research and collaboration communities exist that display an array of purposes and technical features. Overall, though, these communities have become an important means through which researchers exchange data and information (2), and to provide a few examples, the following list has been compiled.

What are Some Examples?

• Alzforum (http://www.alzforum.org) and the SWAN Knowledge Base (http://hypothesis.alzforum.org/swan)

  Short for the Alzheimer Research Forum, Alzforum is an independent, not-for-profit resource created in 1996, during an explosion of new findings in Alzheimer Disease research. The site, intended to help manage the “diverse streams of data pouring out of laboratories” (8), began as a small set of static Web pages featuring manually managed lists of articles and features such as “Papers of the Week” (8). Free for all to use, Alzforum currently provides access to reports on the latest scientific findings, public databases of research data and reagents, and discussion forums. As far back as 2006, the site included more than 40,000 literature citations, 1300 research news articles, 4000 comments, 10,000 antibodies, 200 research models, and 350 genes—as well as more than one million annual visits and 3200 registered members (8). Alzforum has also recently begun an initiative to better capture the context of the information developed within its community and, in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital, has developed the “SWAN Alzheimer Knowledge Base.” Based on SWAN (Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine), Alzforum's Knowledge Base is intended to help manage data and information in such a way that researchers can comprehend their larger context (‘what hypothesis does this support or contradict?’), compare and contrast hypotheses (‘where do these two hypotheses agree and disagree?’), and better synthesize concepts (16). This is achieved using the SWAN ontology, which helps tie statements made in scientific publications or on the Web to scientific evidence, biological terminologies, and claims or counterclaims made by other researchers (17). The Knowledge Base currently contains a selected core of hypotheses annotated by curators, with applications for registered members to post comments (17). As Kinoshita and Strobel explain in their overview of the systems, the goal is to provide researchers with a tool to embed “documents, data, and digital materials in a knowledge model, and then to share the entire model with other scientists and communities, who can build upon it” (8).

• Within3 (https://www.within3.com)

  Founded in 2004, Within3 provides a secure online resource for collaboration between health care professionals. Membership is made up of a number of medical and health care institutions, including hospitals, professional associations, and pharmaceutical companies, which license access to Within3’s platform to create online communities. Within3 communities can support anywhere from 50 to 15,000 members and function to create connections, integrate workspaces, and encourage conversation in a way that meets regulatory and legal compliance standards specific to the health care industry. Communities support multiple media formats, including video, discussion, blogs, and images, with mobile applications currently in design. Within3 does not sell banner ad space or community information, and communities are invitation-only, with public or private access determined by the participating organizations.

• Sermo (http://www.sermo.com)

  Sermo is an online community where physicians can collaborate on challenging cases, share insights, and learn from one another. Currently reporting a membership of over 110,000 U.S. physicians representing 68 medical specialties, Sermo hosts case conferences, a place to pose drug questions, learning opportunities, job postings, and an environment to ask questions and interact with colleagues. There is no cost for physicians to participate and the site does not host advertising. Revenue is generated instead from health care institutions, financial services firms, and government agencies that purchase Sermo products, post questions to the community, and gather information from the system. Sermo employs a security system that authenticates physicians when they register and then revalidates users each time they sign in. Once members, physicians are free to discuss any topic relevant to the medical community, ask questions, monitor observations, and comment on postings.

VIRTUAL RESEARCH ENVIRONMENTS

What Are They?

This category will highlight the tools and repositories sometimes known as Virtual Research Environments (VREs). These resources provide remote access to scientific instruments or software, support interaction among researchers, and include digital libraries and archives that provide access to scientific documents and data (18). They also typically facilitate seamless access to large-scale computational and data grids, streamline research workflows, and establish institutional repository services (19).

Why Do They Matter?

It has been suggested the wide-scale institutional introduction of virtual research environments may offer librarians an opportunity to redefine their relationship with the research community in much the same way that Virtual Learning Environments and Learning Management Systems impacted academic libraries years ago (19). Although impacts will likely vary by individual library, an awareness of the concepts behind these resources may help in designing library services for researchers who use these tools in their work.

What are Some Examples?

• caBIG—The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (https://cabig.nci.nih.gov)

  caBIG was launched in 2004 by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to advance research on cancer and improve clinical outcomes for patients. At its core, caBIG consists of a grid infrastructure that enables connectivity among people, organizations, data, and analysis tools. “Invisible to the end-user and customized for the specific needs of biomedical researchers,” the grid provides standards-based core services, tools, and interfaces so the community can easily connect to share data and analysis efficiently and securely (20). Since its start, more than 40 open source caBIG tools have been developed for those interested in clinical trials management, biospecimens, imaging, genome annotation, proteomics, microarrays, pathways, data and statistical analysis, data sharing, infrastructure, vocabularies, and translational research (20). One of the pillars behind caBIG's success has been its model of federated, open access that includes software and resources available to everyone in the cancer research community (although institutions still maintain local control over their own resources and data). Tools and infrastructure are developed through a participatory process; resources are freely obtainable to ensure broad data sharing; and source code is available to view, alter, and redistribute. More than 1500 participants from 450 organizations have participated in caBIG activities since its inception, including NCI-designated Cancer Centers, individuals, government agencies, and commercial organizations (20). The components of caBIG are applicable beyond the cancer community as well, with caBIG tools and infrastructure currently being used in other therapeutic areas such as cardiovascular disease, integrated to help connect the Nationwide Health Information Network, and, as its public information site explains, “applied to link a complex ecosystem of constituencies in the BIG Health Consortium intended to demonstrate Personalized Medicine in real settings, in real time” (20).

COLLABORATIVE PUBLISHING APPLICATIONS AND REFERENCE-SHARING NETWORKS

What Are They?

This category includes published research materials that incorporate collaborative features and applications. Also included are social bookmarking applications designed to handle reference management.

Why Do They Matter?

Possibly more so than any other category discussed so far, tools that extend the process of interacting with, accessing, or managing published information have the potential to impact librarians and library services. Among others, examples can be found in the introduction of reference-based social bookmarking services from several major publishers (21) and the introduction of multimedia communities such as SciVee (discussed later).

Much more than simply a place to store references for later retrieval, social bookmarking tools such as Connotea, CiteULike, and 2Collab provide pointers to the literature based on what others with similar interests have cited, bookmarked, or defined with tags (22). As new articles are published, these tools allow researchers to bring relevant new items to the attention of one another, serving as a filtering function and accelerating access to information (3). Post-publication collaboration in this form of tagging and annotation, along with reader commentaries linked to articles, such as the community evaluation and discourse notes, comments, and ratings at PLoS ONE, have the potential to turn articles into dynamic entries that change over time (3, 23). Such commentary and review features, while certainly promising, may face an uphill start, however, given past ventures into similar projects like Nature's open peer review (21–22, 24). In any case, developments in this area can be seen in a number of places, and to provide a few examples, the list below has been compiled.

What are Some Examples?

• StemBook (http://www.stembook.org)

  StemBook is a collection of original, open-access, peer-reviewed chapters produced by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing (HII). Divided into sections covering a range of topics related to stem cell biology, StemBook's online format allows for easy updating and supports a range of media, including movies (2). Its design is based on the SCF semantic framework that links content to additional gene and protein information and can additionally support community discourse (2). Each chapter has its own Digital Object Identifier (DOI) as well as an area for registered and approved users to post comments. StemBook is classified as an online periodical with its own ISSN number, and over 80 chapters have been commissioned with submission deadlines extending through fall of 2009 (2).

• SciVee (http://www.scivee.tv)

  SciVee is a multimedia community that provides social networking, collaboration, and communication applications for publishers, societies, and researchers—across K-12 to professional levels. The core of SciVee's services is a platform on which community members share videos describing their work or publicizing articles, posters, or presentations. Content and community features are freely accessible for viewers, and for those uploading items, free services include standard videos and podcasts up to 1 hour. Advanced “SciVeeCast” services are also available for a fee and include PubCasts, PaperCasts, PosterCasts, SlideCasts, and BookCasts, which feature support and more advanced technical applications. For researchers, SciVee casts can be used to promote a work and discuss findings, as well as display figures, supplementary features, references, tags, and even links to original articles. For viewers, SciVee offers the benefit of a more interactive and visible aspect to available research products.

• PLoS ONE (http://www.plosone.org)

  Winner of the 2009 Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) award for publishing innovation (25), PLoS ONE was launched in 2006 as an international, peer-reviewed, open-access publication of the Public Library of Science (PLoS). PLoS ONE publishes reports of original research from many disciplines and is set up to provide a channel for fast publication where authors retain their own copyright. Editorial policies include the nonexclusion of reports based on subject area (all disciplines within science and medicine are considered), and the promise to publish any and all submissions judged by peer-review to be “technically sound” with importance decided “after publication, by the readership.” Also of interest is the publisher's initiative to provide article-level metrics—a set of impact measures for individual articles that includes citation metrics from Scopus, PubMed Central, and CrossRef, as well as usage statistics, blog coverage, social bookmarks, and community ratings.

• Connotea (http://www.connotea.org), CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org), and 2Collab (http://www.2collab.com)

  Several of the top social bookmarking tools designed to handle reference management are produced by major publishing groups, including Connotea, a product of the Nature Publishing Group, CiteULike from Springer, and 2Collab from Elsevier. Overall, these tools also share a few common design features, including (a) one-click browser buttons that allow users to instantly add citations to hosted bookmark libraries; (b) tagging with keywords to assist in organizing and searching across other user libraries; (c) user profiles that include bibliographies of published material, areas of expertise, and ongoing research activities; and (d) group functions that allow users who have common interests to share or discover references, as well as set privacy settings for collaboration (26–28).

DISCUSSION

The purpose of this column was to search broadly across a number of collaborative research tools and produce a report tailored for the health sciences, and in particular, the hospital library community. Efforts were made to be as inclusive as possible in researching what was available and choosing the best examples for the given audience, but many more examples exist than could be included within the scope of this article. Further areas of research could include a more comprehensive inventory of collaborative tools designed for medical research, possibly working off broader models such as the Bos et al. review (12). Investigations into use and impact statistics may also be of value in the future, with some work already available from Elsevier's recent survey of the use of social applications for research (26).

CONCLUSION

Although it was not the intent here to speculate on the future of these resources, it is reasonable to expect that collaborative tools will continue to see development and improved features over time. While only a current status report could be provided here, it is hoped that future studies will investigate the ongoing advancement of collaborative tools, as well as the extent to which they may impact the process of research.

Notes

Comments and suggestions should be sent to the Column Editors: Hope Leman (E-mail: [email protected]) or Nicole Mitchell (E-mail: [email protected]).