Meeting our Researcher Needs with an RNS
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This document summarizes a presentation about using a researcher networking system (RNS) to meet researcher needs. It recommends taking two steps: 1) find out what researchers want and build features to satisfy their needs and 2) treat researcher profiles as products that need to be marketed, found, liked, and consumed. It then outlines a four step "researcher go to market" plan: market researcher profiles to draw interest, optimize search engine results to aid finding profiles, design understandable and personalized profiles to promote liking researchers, and support interactions to facilitate consumption of researcher information. The goal is to help researchers seek opportunities through an effective RNS system.
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Meeting our Researcher Needs with an RNS
- 1. Clinical and Translational Science Institute / CTSI at the University of California, San Francisco Meeting your Researcher Needs with an RNS Eric Meeks, CTSI at UCSF VIVO Conference, August, 2014
- 2. Meeting your Researcher Needs with an RNS in Two Not-So-Simple Steps 1. Find out what they want and build it. – Even if they don’t know what they want, they think they do. Satisfy their whim and they will like you. – We’ve built extensions into our RNS based on direct research input (mentoring, list tool) 2. “Objectify” your researchers. – This is less obvious than step 1, but has more impact. – Think of your researchers as products, not (just) users.
- 3. Researcher “Go to Market” Business Plan Market -> Find -> Like -> Consume 1. You want people to seek out information about your researchers. 2. Then you want them to find that information. 3. Next they need to understand and (hopefully) like that information. 4. Finally, they need to do something useful with that information. • The 4th item it what we all want, but order matters so you need these other 3 things to happen as best you can.
- 4. Step 1: Market • Do what you can at your local institution – Send out emails. – Have more important people than you send out emails. – Talk to departments. – Share data, give away iPads, etc. • Understand and accept the fact that you are not the best marketer for the researcher. They are, and that is good.
- 5. Step 2: Be Found • Invest heavily in Search Engine Optimization • Invest more heavily in SEO • Talk to Anirvan Chatterjee on how and why to do SEO » http://profiles.ucsf.edu/anirvan.chatterjee
- 6. Step 3: Be Liked and Understood • Make your profile pages pretty • Make your pages understandable at a glance • Give your researchers many ways to express themselves • “Consumerization of Technology” – Your web users may end up being smart and inquisitive, but they start off being lazy and “unwilling to think”. Thank Google and Amazon for this.
- 7. Step 4: Be Consumed • Helped me prepare lectures and work with students • I found a potential book contributor • It helps me find info about faculty • Identify potential mentors • Looking for research opportunities • Great resource for finding potential research collaborators and for PhD dissertation committees • Helped prepare research critique • Helped find new nursing research problems • Found info about doctors
- 8. Meeting your Researchers Needs • Researcher Information is a Product that: 1. Wants to be wanted 2. Wants to be found 3. Wants to be liked 4. Wants to interact with someone
Editor's Notes
- If you find the 2nd point offensive I apologize. And you need to get over it. You have a product, now you need a business plan.
- Something useful may mean collaborate. It may mean find a mentor. If you’re a patient or a friend of a patient it can mean many things. Search for a clinical trail, or learn more about a condition this researcher is an expert on. If your UofT and you are looking at the UCSF profiles site, it may mean to hire them. We don’t have a good quantitative way to measure item 4 yet, but we do have anecdotal evidence
- No silver bullet. This is pick and shovel work. By researcher we mean researcher and their work. If no one is interested in your institution on your researchers in the first place, there is not much an RNS can do. The good news, this isn’t your fault. We can market our profile pages but not the researchers themselves. You want to solve this problem, you need to work at an institution that does good research. There’s only so much we can do about this and it’s good to recognize. We’ve done what we can. We get people excited about KBD’s Profile Page but at some level they need to be excited UCSF, or research at UCSF or a researcher at UCSF first. That’s what the rest of UCSF needs to do to make our job easy. The researchers do have some responsibility for making UCSF look respectable. Good to mention that robert lustig is the most viewed pages. Kudos to him, not us.
- See that URL and the name. That’s about SEO! We get more traffic from google/bing/yahoo than anything else BY FAR! Are researchers using our RNS systems in their day to day work? Maybe. Are they using the internet? Yes This is phase one of the “consumerization of technology”. Search engines matter. A lot.
- Pretty and simple matters. If your researchers say that it doesn’t matter and that having complete and correct information is all that matters, they are wrong. How to do this? There are online resources that can help you beautify and simplify your pages. Don’t make me think!
- We have a small survey that pops … surprisingly many folks do leave us substantive comments We actually are proud of our local instance of Profiles. Note the ‘researcher as product, as well as user/actor’ in these quotes. If a no-researcher comes to our site to read about Robert Lustig and considers reducing the amount of soda they drink based on what they find on our site, that is an absolute win! Dr. Lustig did not get a collaborator out of this engagement, but he did improve someone’s health, and that is the final goal.
- Having said all this, this is just the starting point for what needs to be done to satisfy our researchers. This is the cost of doing business on the internet, and we need to do more to really tap the values of our tools. We can market our profile pages but not the researchers themselves. You want to solve this problem, you need to work at an institution that does good research. There’s only so much we can do about this and it’s good to recognize. We’ve done what we can. We get people excited about KBD’s Profile Page but at some level they need to be excited UCSF, or research at UCSF or a researcher at UCSF first. That’s what the rest of UCSF needs to do to make our job easy. The researchers do have some responsibility for making UCSF look respectable. Good to mention that robert lustig is the most viewed pages. Kudos to him, not us. SEO is the most critical think you can do, so do it. Are people using research networking tools to find out about researchers? Sure, some are. But a different question: Are people using the internet to find out about research and researchers? Of course they are, so consider that square one. It’s the consumerization of technology. And… most of our traffic still comes from google/bing/yahoo, much more so than our internal search or any other search products we at this table have built. And most of those searches are based on a persons name. Goes back to the SEEK element. Robert Lustig did whatever it is he does to get so many people googling for his, we just made sure they found profiles in the process. Back to the “right people” comment a few slides back. We do look at our traffic to see how much is coming from UCSF, other institutions, government agencies, big pharma and general public. Someone looking for a researchers at UCSF might be a researcher looking for a collaborator (the big win) or it might be someone from the general public who is just curious about one of our researchers or the work they do (smaller win, but still a win). Seo isn’t going to get people who are looking for funny cat videos artificially driving up the traffic on your site, so don’t worry about that. Anyone who finds a profile page on your site and bothers to read it is the right audience. Having said that, we do monitor the flavor of our traffic so that if we make a change to the system and things go in a direction we don’t care for, we can look into it. LIKE. Make the profile pages look nice. Make it pretty, people like pretty. If your researchers say they don’t care about how it looks and that they only care about how informative and complete the data is, they are LIEING to you. IF they really believe in this they are LIEING to themselves (and Anirvan can probably prove that with some of this Google Analytics magic, but let’s not go there). You can’t escape the cosumerization of technology so embrace it and make it your friend, not your enemy. Orng is good for this because the commercial content we bring in is, well, commercial. They know that pretty matters. (Show RDF/XML. This is the same data as the HTML. If we didn’t care about pretty we could all just do this. CONSUME Make the data understandable at a glance, but of course allow people to go deeper if they want to (show global health dude).