Find Experts

Find Experts is a powerful tool that is unique to CERF and which offers a solution to a problem faced by many 21CFR11 compliant systems: How can users locate or be aware of important information in a system if they do not have explicit access to see it? This can be a frustrating barrier to productivity. It seems counterintuitive that an organization’s scientific and business objectives might be blocked because their data management system may be hiding information from scientists whose work would benefit from it, but nonetheless, in a compliant system it is sometimes necessary to grant access to information only on a “need to know” basis.

Find Experts gets around this problem by calculating which CERF users are most likely to have access to information you need but do not have permission to see.  

Find Experts can also be used to help answer a number of other common laboratory questions, examples might include:

• Who has contributed most to a specific File Cabinet?
• Who is most likely to know how to use this piece of equipment?
• Who has worked with a specific sample the most?
• Who is working with this specific CERF Resource?
• Who has frequently tagged their work with a specific Advanced Tag?

The Find Experts button can be used with any type of search, including Full Text, Tag, Title or CERF Resource ID. Instead of returning results made up of lists of resources that the searcher has access to, it returns the identities of CERF users, plus a relative score that can help determine which user is MOST strongly associated with related resources anywhere in CERF even resources that the searcher does not have access to.

For example, imagine a new employee at a plant science company who needs to locate some auxin for use in an experiment. She tries Full Text and Tag searches for “auxin”, but can only find a few resources submitted by people she already knows, and none of them know where the Auxin is kept.

However, when she clicks “Find Experts” CERF suggests just one user “Robert Two”.  Since none of the hits in the standard search were connected with Robert Two, the user concludes that 1) Robert Two works with auxin far more frequently than her other colleagues and 2) she does not yet have access to any of Robert Two’s auxin-related work. The user then clicks on the user’s name in the Find Experts results. A new email to that user is automatically generated. The new employee can now ask Robert Two for assistance, without having to bother every other scientist in the lab, none of whom are particularly likely to work with auxin.