So this is a blog post/pet-project..
Goal: This project aims to enhance the meaningfulness of literature searches.
Current journal submission requirements ask only for the inclusion of a few key words to aid in categorizing an article. The ability to draw context from key word or title searches is almost non-existent.
I believe that a key to improving literature searches is to know what question (not merely the hypothesis) the researcher thinks their work has answered. Knowing that an article feels it answers more of a “what” question rather than a “how” question could be of tremendous help when looking for relevant literature.
The author is in the best position to reflect on the work presented and determine what question that piece of information best answers. It may be that over the research life of an investigator they answer only one question – the same question for every publication and this would be a way to understand the development of the experiments and the investigators experiences within the field.
Therefore, this project will work to discuss the possibility of question inclusion with journals in various fields as well as continue this discussion with members of the scientific community.
Any thoughts, suggestions or questions about this project?
How does this project connect to the “metadata” that is contained within articles for web searches, so that researchers can use questions containing several concepts or words in one search?
I guess I am finding it difficult to envisage how the new field you propose would differ from this collection of metadata, or from full-text searches for the title of the article (which contains the “key” question being answered by the research?).
Maxine,
Your question deserves a very detailed answer, which I hope to get to soon. The short of it is, the field would allow you to parse results into What, How, Why etc. For instance: I want to know how two proteins interact and don’t care (for the moment) under what conditions these proteins may be expressed. However, if I were to plug in the proteins names both types of responses would be presented and I would have to sort through all of the literature even though some percentage is completely useless to my question. I hope to provide a very specific example soonish.