Preparing MethodBox for National Service

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This is a proposal to deliver a new on-line system for bringing different researchers together to share their expertise and work together on complex social problems. It is important to have different disciplines working together because individual disciplines have different strengths and weaknesses. For example a Social Scientist studying social factors in obesity may have excellent knowledge of how to measure socio-economic status whereas an Epidemiologist may have complementary knowledge about whether to use Body Mass Index or waist-to-hip ratio as the measure of obesity. Even within the Social Sciences there are different disciplines, for example those more familiar with qualitative than quantitative research methods, and vice versa - when a mixture of the two approaches would create a richer picture of the social problem being studied.We are already working on this problem by using a combination of: 1) studying the way Social Scientists and Health Scientists use information for research; and 2) building web-browser based software to make it easier for researchers from different backgrounds to find the right data for their research question - supporting one another through social networks -like 'Facebook for Scientists'. The prototype of this system is called MethodBox and can be found at www.methodbox.org. Studies of the prototype have shown it is very popular with users from a wide range of backgrounds. By examining the way people use the system we can see that it could be developed further: moving from a simple system to help people find the data they are looking for to a more complex system that raises awareness of data and methods the researcher may not have considered. This awareness might be raised in new ways by harnessing the way researchers interact with datasets and with one another on-line. Like the shopping website Amazon, a user might be prompted "other researchers who selected your data items also selected these items...". This is particularly important with the growth in scientific knowledge because it is becoming less realistic for a researcher to have read all relevant papers before they start their research - for example last month over two thousand new papers were published on obesity.With a sustained effort, beyond the funding period of the initial eScience Node project, MethodBox could be made ready for the national data services to use. This proposal seeks that sustainability funding so the Economic and Social Data Service and the UK Data Archive can have a reliable socially networked way that users can access archived data and share expertise. It is likely that MethodBox can release more research from the same level of investment in data services because users have a new facility for supporting one another. So investing in this project will multiply the large investments in data services. This proposal is directly in line with the "e-Infrastructure" changes that a recent report across the UK Research Councils called for.