PERSONAL PATTERNS OF INFORMATION USE IN AN INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT LABORATORY

In his thesis entitled ‘Managing the Flow of Scientific and Technological Information’ Professor T.J. Allen of MIT was able to show that patterns of information usage could be derived by various means such as the use of questionnaires, and by observations made among the scientists and technologists during their work in R & D establishments in the USA—and by the study of parallel projects in which two or more R&D groups work on the same problem, he was able to relate these patterns to the performance of the scientific personnel engaged on that problem.