In the last three months, we have finished the transcribing and coding of all of our interviews with members of teams who conducted experiments at the Mag Lab. Our graduate research assistants completed the transcriptions, then they and PI Kathy Burnett and co-PIs Michelle Kazmer and Gary Burnett coded the transcripts according to our codebook, drawing on the theory of information worlds, life cycles concepts, and scientific collaboration research. Kathy, Gary, and Michelle are entering these codes into NVivo for further analysis towards developing our model of the lifecycles of virtual scientific teams and writing publications. We thank everyone who participated in our interviews for their time and contributions to our study!
Our paper “Author Team Diversity and the Impact of Scientific Publications” has now been accepted (after revisions) to the journal Library and Information Science Research. It reports quantitative findings on the quality and impact of Mag Lab publications and the relationship between seniority, affiliation, and impact in teams of co-authors. We have made a preprint available on our Publications page, and the article will be formally published later this year. We offer our thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the LISR journal editors for their comments and feedback as we revised our paper.
We presented two posters at the 2012 iConference in Toronto (February 7th – 11th). One reported our findings from our observations of teams conducting experiments at the Mag Lab, in light of lifecycles concepts and the theory of information worlds; this was led by graduate research assistant Adam Worrall and co-PI Paul Marty. Both the two-page abstract and the poster itself can be seen on our Publications page. We have also nearly finished writing a journal article focused on the observations, presenting our findings in detail and after further analysis; the paper also incorporates feedback and comments we received on our earlier poster. We plan to submit this paper to an interdisciplinary journal within the next few weeks. Many thanks to all of the teams of scientists we observed for letting us see what you were doing and how you collaborated!
The other poster we presented at the iConference reported findings from exploratory, preliminary interviews on data management and sharing practices at the Mag Lab and in condensed matter physics; we received excellent comments and feedback. These interviews were conducted and analyzed by senior personnel Chris Hinnant and co-PI Besiki Stvilia, with assistance from graduate research assistant Shuheng Wu. This poster and its two-page abstract can also be seen via our Publications page. The findings from these interviews and feedback we received on the poster are informing the development of a survey on Mag Lab staff and visitors’ perceptions of data management and sharing practices, lifecycles, and metadata needs. We plan to collect data using this survey within the next three months, and hope you will all be willing to participate and help us with our research!