Software for Scientists

Here is the crazy thing about software designed for scientists – most of the time, it’s not scientists that design it. How can a computer architect or programmer truly understand the needs and requirements of a profession that is not their own? They kind of, well, can’t. They do the best they can, they hire scientific consultants (ahem, if you are reading this, please consider hiring me), so on and so forth, and yet occasionally, they still fall short.

Take for example, PubMed. I wrote a post on another blog about my hatred… ok, I am slowly learning to moderate my language… my dislike, let’s say, of PubMed. I, someone who is pretty freakin' far from computer illiterate, find it difficult to use. I think it is counter-intuitive and counter productive. The response to that post has been nothing short of atomic. My rant somehow wound up on a medical librarian listserv and they came out in force defending NCBI and PubMed, listing pages and pages of helpful and warm instructions and hints on how to make it do what I need it to do, pages of suggestions, with offers of hands-on assistance and training, which have all been wonderful. Occasionally though, they were biting and harsh, saying that if I only knew what I was doing (and only if I weren't so ignorant... yup, ignorant), PubMed would seem to me the greatest thing ever.

But here’s the thing. Besides the fact that I hope never in my lifetime to be called ignorant again, in their generous offers of help and advice (which I very VERY much appreciate and cannot give thanks enough everyone's support and attention), they proved my point. I am a research scientist by long, hard training. I am a fairly web-savvy research scientist, and still, I have trouble with PubMed.

The search engine is not made for medical librarians. It’s not made for computer programmers. It’s made for scientists, to be used by scientists, needed most by scientists. It should be easy for scientists, goofy, only moderately-computer literate scientists, to use. It should be intuitive (read: Google), it should not have a ginormous page of inscrutable instructions, it should not require the hour-long training sessions, kindly offered at most medical libraries. It should be plug and chug.

It isn’t. Neither is the statistical software I (try to) use, nor are the scary molecule modeling modules I had to use my first year of grad school. Although that may have more to do with my general ineptitude with chemistry than anything else. So here is my question – how do we make all these, dare I say, web2.0 technologies not only user friendly, but scientist friendly?

We, as scientists, are not like most computer users. We have gobs of education in fields that often do not intersect with computer things. We can have more degrees than we have socks, and still not be able to find the paper we need on a medical literature search engine. How do we fix this, and why is it happening?

I think I am now starting to understand yet another barrier of scientists to web2.0. Until the technologies are easily accessible and usable, no one, myself included, is going to use them.

Bah humbug, whatever that means.

Signing off,

Your loyal cranky scientist blogger.