The first 18 months of the project have been very fast paced, productive, and successful. The research team has already been able to complete extracting publications resulting from research at the Mag Lab, using these publications to identify teams, using this data to construct a social network of researchers using the Lab, collecting demographic data for each team member, and using all of this data to build a regression model to test five hypotheses.
Since the last update we have made much progress, and our quantitative analysis continues. Led by senior personnel Chris Hinnant and co-PI Besiki Stvilia, we submitted a paper based on our analysis of the quality and impact of Mag Lab publications and the relationships between seniority, affiliation, and impact. After incorporating peer reviewer feedback we have now resubmitted this paper for review. This analysis and our observations and interviews have also informed qualitative interviews by Hinnant, Stvilia, and research assistant Shuheng Wu exploring the management, curation, quality, and lifecycle of data at the Magnet Lab, from which they intend to develop a survey on these topics for wider distribution.
The research team also continues to conduct interviews and observations at the Mag Lab. We have completed over 58 hours of observations and over 10 interviews with Mag Lab scientists, users, and students. Our observations have been led by co-PI Paul Marty, with the assistance of research assistant Adam Worrall and our graduate and undergraduate interns. PI Kathy Burnett and co-PI Michelle Kazmer conduct our interviews, with the note-taking and transcribing assistance of our interns and research assistants. We continue to analyze both the observations and interviews according to our codebook, drawing upon the theory of information worlds (co-developed by co-PI Gary Burnett), lifecycles concepts, and scientific collaboration research.
The team has been able to build a collaborative relationship with the staff at the NHMFL, which allows us to gather quality data. We thank everyone who has participated in interviews, consented to observations, and/or helped our project in other ways so far!