The British Library has announced that a report – based on a study conducted along with the Research Information Network – seeks to provide an insight into how information is used by researchers across life sciences. The report has revealed that researcher practices diverge from policies promoted by funders and information service providers.
The study, ‘Patterns of Information Use and Exchange: Case Studies of Researchers in Life Sciences’, used an approach to capture the day-to-day patterns of information use in seven research teams from a wide range of disciplines. It was undertaken over 11 months and involved 56 participants. The report concludes that ‘one-size-fits-all’ information and data sharing policies are not achieving scientifically productive and cost-efficient information use in life sciences. It found a significant gap between how researchers behave and the policies and strategies of funders and service providers. This suggests that the attempts to implement such strategies have had only a limited impact.
According to the report, researchers tend to use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources and resources. It also says that the use of social networking tools for scientific research purposes is far more limited than expected; data and information sharing activities are mainly driven by needs and benefits perceived as most important by life scientists rather than ‘top-down’ policies and strategies; and there are marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange between research groups active in different areas of the life sciences, reinforcing the need to avoid standardised policy approaches. The report sets out a number of recommendations to funders, universities and information service providers on how policy and services can be more aligned with research practice.
The study was undertaken by the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation, the UK Digital Curation Centre and the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services. The report can be downloaded from www.rin.ac.uk/case-studies
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