Most research organizations have several product pipelines that contain an assortment of information, articles, notes, and more. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have all your pertinent pipeline information in one spot, easily accessible by any team member?
When considering literature management solutions, rapid access to information can be the catalyst for that new innovation or product idea. That’s why designing a system which enables the seamless transfer of information within a team needs to be at the forefront of consideration. This is especially important for the European medical device researchers operating in the European Union, as MDR-compliant literature review requirements go into effect May 2021, requiring systematic tracking of access to information during the development process.
Some important questions that might arise when creating a literature workflow for are:
- How do I make sure everyone has access to all the information they need, while maintaining privacy and reducing information overload?
- How do you find the right papers/citations and integrate them into your existing workflow?
- What are examples of different individual workflows?
Subscribing users to the correct pipelines
One of the challenges in designing a literature workflow for your organization is maintaining internal subscriptions to information on various products and pipelines. Even a small organization is likely to have several products in development, and different researchers are involved in different projects. Therefore, a single, simple interface to allow an administrator to manage pipeline subscriptions for your researchers can save time required for them to access mission critical information.
Additionally, if you are working on projects with sensitive information, it may be that it is important to keep some researchers (ex. contractors) from being able to access information not required for their project(s). Any literature management tool should enable you to easily control this flow of information, while minimizing down time spent looking for the right information.
Finding the right papers and exporting to third-party tools
Every researcher maintains a unique workflow for discovery of knowledge. This might start at Scholar or PubMed, and end with Mendeley, EndNote, or one of the many valuable free reference tools in the ecosystem. No matter the workflow, a good literature management solution will contain a robust API, enabling researchers to integrate their existing workflow into the platform, and vice versa.
This will look like a tool to enable researchers to search any platform and easily access articles, save those articles to searchable folders, and allow for the markup of documents so that printed copies of articles in filing cabinets becomes a thing of the past. Additionally, any service should enable users to export their due diligence into the platform of their choice (ex. Mendeley, EndNote, Paperpile, etc.)
An example of managing literature workflow for a product pipeline: The ACME Corporation
The ACME Corporation is developing a new series of Roadrunner traps. They have 5 researchers, Wile E., Miles C., Kylie D., Guy Lee, and Aileen T. They regularly access articles to help in their innovation process. Each user accesses at least a handful of articles every month, amounting to a total for the team of perhaps 100 articles/month. DeepDyve allows this team to save over $3000/mo. compared with the price of purchasing individual articles behind paywalls.
Upon entering your DeepDyve enterprise account, you are presented with a simple intuitive, interface that enables you to access, organize, and share all the information you encounter down your various rabbit holes. Since every researcher is unique, the platform has been designed with different workflows in mind.
Wile E. prefers to start his searches at Google Scholar. He finds that the multidisciplinary nature of his work requires a robust access database. Luckily, DeepDyve offers a Scholar extension, allowing him to freely access any article available as part of an extensive collection of more than 25 million articles in just two clicks. This allows him to explore diverse topics like ecology, animal behaviors, computer science, psychology, chemistry, or whatever knowledge is needed in his pursuits.
He can create folders, as highlighted below, add his colleagues to those folders, and automatically keep an audit of all searches and articles accessed while using Scholar, PubMed, or the DeepDyve platform directly.
Miles C. prefers to use DeepDyve as a search engine. He starts by searching for articles using a simple, intuitive, search interface, and can easily find any article available instantly via full-text, or for those articles not available via instant access, they may still be purchased through the centralized interface and delivered within minutes. With a cloud database included in the subscription, Miles C. can upload articles to the cloud, have them automatically identified, and share that information throughout the organization. All of the existing articles Miles has purchased can now easily be shared using the same interface for all content access.
Kylie D. is focused on the ecological and biological impacts of roadrunner traps, and therefore makes use of PubMed to find the information that she needs. Whether she starts with a PubMed search or on DeepDyve’s search bar, she will find that every article from PubMed is indexed regularly and available as an open-access article, a rentable paywalled article, or a purchasable article. This flexibility allows Kylie to store all of the information that she needs for her projects, easily sharing this information with her colleagues.
Trapping roadrunners is obviously a high priority for the ACME Corporation. Therefore, every dollar ACME can save on literature expenses can be used on its ultimate goal; catching the pesky roadrunner. DeepDyve allows researchers to access unlimited articles, be it part of an unlimited plan, or through the ability to purchase and manage every article from a single point in your organization. Researchers go down different product development pathways, creating folders and breadcrumbs for their fellow researchers to follow while all of this information is managed on a single innovative platform, designed with each individual researcher in mind.