1. Blake & Pratt’s ‘Collaborative Information Synthesis’
John MacMullen
SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club
Spring 2003
Blake, Catherine & Pratt, Wanda (2002). Collaborative information synthesis. In Proceedings of the 65th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), pp

2. SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club
What is Meta-Analysis?
Team approach to research on research
Multiple studies examining similar factors are normalized and pooled
Used in medicine, public health, epidemiology, etc.
Meta-analysis is collaborative information synthesis
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3. Information Synthesis
Define research question
Search literature
Assess results
Combine results
Place findings in context
refine search
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4. SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club
Research Goals
Help medical researchers use the literature faster and more completely than current manual methods
Reduce information overload
Develop automated methods for synthesizing the medical literature
SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club

5. SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club
Research Components
Information needs, seeking strategies, and collaborative behaviors of medical and public health researchers
Collaboration strategies
Review of published meta-analyses shows most are a collaboration with multiple authors
Collaborative information synthesis model
METIS system architecture
SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club

6. SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club
METIS Architecture
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7. SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club
Use Case Example
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8. SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club
Use Case Example
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9. Relevance to IV Lab Research
Scholarly electronic collaboration (ScholOnto)
(Semi-) Automatic extraction of text and quantitative data from documents
Synthesis of biomedical data and information
SILS Bioinformatics Journal Club