Enslaved to the Trapped Data: A Cognitive Work Analysis of Medical Systematic Reviews

Knight, Ian A.; Wilson, Max L.; Brailsford, David F.; Milic-Frayling, Natasa

Abstract

Systematic reviews are a comprehensive and parameterised form of literature review, found in most disciplines, that involve exhaustive analyses and rigorous interpretation of prior literature. Performing systematic reviews, however, can involve repetitive and laborious work in order to reach reliable standards, especially in strictly regulated domains where the quality of acquired knowledge is of critical importance, like in evidence-based medicine. This makes tools providing computerised assistance or automation during the task attractive. However, it is unclear which aspects of this Work Task are best suited for such support. This paper describes a three-month ethnographic study and Cognitive Work Analysis of the systematic reviews performed by a medical research group. Our findings provide the basis for future work designing search tools with localised optimization and subtask automation to support specific phases of the process.

Citation

Knight, I. A., Wilson, M. L., Brailsford, D. F., & Milic-Frayling, N. (2019). Enslaved to the Trapped Data: A Cognitive Work Analysis of Medical Systematic Reviews. In Proceedings of 2019 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) (203-212). https://doi.org/10.1145/3295750.3298937

• Conference Name: CHIIR '19: Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
• Conference Location: Glasgow, Scotland, UK
• Start Date: Mar 10, 2019
• End Date: Mar 14, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Nov 13, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Mar 8, 2019
• Publication Date: Mar 8, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jan 16, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: May 9, 2019
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 203-212
• Book Title: Proceedings of 2019 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR)
• ISBN: 9781450360258
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3295750.3298937
• Keywords: Work task; Systematic review; Cognitive work analysis
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1476744
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3295750.3298937
• Related Public URLs: https://sigir.org/chiir2019/
• Additional Information: Published in: CHIIR '19 Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. Pages 203-212 ; Glasgow, Scotland UK — March 10 - 14, 2019. ACM : New York, NY, USA ©2019