Communications of the ACM
CLA Researcher Invents New Tools to Manage 'information Overload' Threatening Neuroscience
A new research map tool can help neuroscientists avoid information overload and quickly scan existing research in order to plan their next studies.
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University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers have developed a research map tool to enable neuroscientists to quickly scan existing neuroscience research and plan their next study.
"Information overload is the elephant in the room that most neuroscientists pretend to ignore," says UCLA professor Alcino Silva. "Without a way to organize the literature, we risk missing key discoveries and duplicating earlier experiments. Research maps will enable neuroscientists to quickly clarify what ground has already been covered and to fully grasp its meaning for future studies."
The maps provide simplified, interactive summaries of research findings, and a Web-based app helps scientists expand and interact with their field's map.
"We founded research maps on a crowd-sourcing strategy in which individual scientists add papers that interest them to a growing map of their fields," Silva says. "Each map is interactive and searchable; scientists see as much of the map as they query, much like an online search."
Scientists can focus in on areas that interest them and track published findings to determine what might be missing and, therefore, which experiments might be worth pursuing. The researchers aim to automate the map-creation process so new papers will automatically be added to the collection as they are published.
From UCLA Newsroom (CA)
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Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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