Content desperately seeking granularity
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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According to Andrew Richardson (Wolters Kluwer Health) speaking at Online Information 2011, a medical paper is published every thirty seconds. That equates to 1.5 million papers per year. Talk about information overload.

In addition, the new knowledge generated by randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in medical papers takes on average 17 years to be incorporated into practice, reports Andrew. Talk about a long time.

Yet even with questions around volume and time, the journal research paper is still the number one source for clinical professionals. This could be in part due to the developments around granularity in research article content.

Research content has never been two-dimensional or flat. However it takes a lot of time and energy to pick an article apart – not just the main body of the text, but interrogating the reference section and tracking citations, looking closely at the methodology and the underlying questions posed. And scrutinising the research datasets, if they are supplied at all.

Tim Babbet, ProQuest, thinks that Web 3.0 trends are now beginning to allow the research article to be broken down, added to, expanded out and shared at levels we never thought possible a few years ago. This not only changes the dimension and energy of the content, but also the speed of sharing, building on the evidence base, and should result in an improved speed of innovation.

Many of the vendors reported similar trends in research article granularity.

The importance of text will decline. The rise will be in audio, datasets, video and images. The evolving article will have YouTube video podcasts and highly granular datasets attached.

The network of ideas will continue as a feature. In FreePint product reviews it is one of the features we look for in a product.

It is possible to visualise academic institutions or experts in topic areas. Research is no longer a single-institution activity. Multi-institution partnership approaches means that funding can be shared and each institution can offer its particular expertise. This encourages greater sharing of content and findings with quicker routes to innovation. Visualising cross-network workflow is another bonus.

Another interesting idea was around nodes of content within the research article: potentially each assembly node could create another layer of discussion or content. For example – you might want to get to the nub of the methodology used, find out the multi-organisation workflow methodology, drill down into the datasets or see what are the discussion points around presenting the research. The list is endless, but each node is a new starting point.  

When we review products at FreePint our checklist also includes searching and personalisation.

Tim Babbet belives that natural query language, query length increasing, query as a question and then moving to conversation (Siri) are all the trends to consider. Social searching techniques such as human generated suggestions – think spelling suggestions, query terms, recommendations and ranking. Personalisation is here to stay – what do you want, how do you want to view, what style of search and what do you want to do with the output.

Some say the research article has had its day. I think we are just starting to see a new beginning.

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