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Topic

A Characterization of Early Career Researchers’ Activities With Academic Sources for Writing

Department of Computer Science

Date & location

• Thursday, August 15, 2024

• 10:00 A.M.

• Engineering & Computer Science Building

• Room 468

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Miguel Nacenta, Department of Computer Science, ·¬ÇÑÉçÇø (Supervisor)

• Dr. Neil Ernst, Department of Computer Science, UVic (Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. Sara Humphreys, Academic and Technical Writing Program, UVic 

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Tatiana Gounko, Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies, UVic

   

Abstract

Research processes involve gathering and understanding previous work, including finding existing literature, reading, annotating, collecting and, finally, synthesizing summaries as literature surveys and related work sections. Although much work has been devoted to understanding how people find and retrieve previous work and how people use existing reference managers, in this paper we consider the processes involving research of previous literature in a broader context, looking at how the found sources and references are incorporated into the process of writing new papers and reports.

We propose an activity model (RaMSeS) for the general process of research with academic sources; from paper search to the writing of text that incorporates previous work citations. We used this model to design a survey that investigates current practices by early career researchers. Through the survey, we were able to classify early career researchers into three coarse groups: casual collection managers (who use reference management systems less and tend not to revisit their collections), traditional document managers (who tend to take comprehensive notes but use multiple systems to manage information), and digitally-savvy collection managers (who are more interested in organizing and categorizing their document collections). We also learned about the ways in which participants use their source collections for writing, refreshing their knowledge, and recognizing patterns in the literature. We also conducted an evaluation study with experts in the field of library sciences to understand the applicability of our proposed model (RaMSeS) to assist in the teaching and explanation of the entire process of collecting and curating bibliographies for early career researchers. We provide a thorough thematic analysis of the interviews that we conducted with the experts who overall, found the RaMSeS model useful and provided insightful feedback on how it can be applied to the entire research process. Our findings can support the development of tools that further support the later parts of the research process when existing literature is re-read and analyzed to become part of new research documents.