Collaborative information synthesis II: Recommendations for information systems to support synthesis activities

Abstract

As the quantity of information continues to exceed our human processing capacity, information systems must support users as they face the daunting task of synthesizing information. One activity that consumes much of a scientist's time is developing models that balance contradictory and redundant evidence. Driven by our desire to understand the information behaviors of this important user group, and the behaviors of scientific discovery in general, we conducted an observational study of academic research scientists as they resolved different experimental results reported in the biomedical literature. This article is Part 2 of two articles that report our findings. In Part 1 (Blake & Pratt, 2006), we introduced the Collaborative Information Synthesis (CIS) model, which captures the salient information behaviors that we observed. In this article, we review existing cognitive and information seeking models that have inadvertently reported synthesis behavior and provide five recommendations for systems designers to build information systems that support synthesis activities.