Tag: user research
-
Preprint peer reviews
Europe PMC started indexing preprint articles in 2018, alongside peer-reviewed journal articles. During the COVID-19 pandemic preprints became increasingly popular as they offered immediate access to research findings and data. But it was left up to the reader to make a judgement about the robustness of the science, as no peer reviews were available. Several…
-
Europe PMC redesign
Europe PMC is an open, life sciences literature discovery tool that supports the open access policies of 37 funders. The primary users are life sciences researchers (academic and industry), clinicians and biocurators. The challenge When I joined the team they had limited knowledge of user-centred design, no user research insights or behavioural analytics and lots…
-
Annotations
There is a wealth of information in scientific articles. Europe PMC contains millions of life sciences articles. Finding specific evidence within such a huge corpus of research literature has historically been very challenging for researchers and biocurators. When I joined the Europe PMC team they had already put in place text mining algorithms to automate…
-
Author profiles
Europe PMC provides access to millions of life sciences research articles. It can be challenging to find articles by a particular author or co-author, particularly if they have a common name. To resolve this issue, Europe PMC integrates with ORCID, the registry of unique, persistent identifiers for academic researchers. Authors can maintain their own ORCID…
-
Open Access service
UK government and funder policies require researchers to publish their work Open Access. In 2014 a new requirement came into place which meant that all research articles which had been accepted for publication by a journal should be deposited in an institutional repository at the point of publication, and made available open access. The brief…
-
Source Control for Oracle
Source controlling databases is manual and time-consuming, prone to human error, which causes problems during deployments such as accidental data loss. Red Gate Software already had a source control tool for SQL databases, but did not have one for the Oracle market. The challenge This was a technically complex project with a small team and…
