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Emily Hesketh, a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, discusses her Research Note published on F1000Research about a method to improve communication between specialists in interdisciplinary teams.

With the amount of digital information that we create growing exponentially researchers are exploring new methods of storage. We are one such research team who are exploring the practicality of DNA for storing digital information.

Each specialist tends to speak their own ‘language’, which can make effective clear communication between specialists challenging.

To overcome the unique challenges this project raises, we interact frequently with a diverse range of specialists from molecular biologists and DNA sequencing and synthesis specialists to computer scientists and information theorists. Each specialist tends to speak their own ‘language’, which can make effective clear communication between specialists challenging.

Communication, both written and verbal, is crucial for any effective collaborative project. Yet this is something that is often overlooked. We experienced difficulties in some of our early discussions as we didn’t fully appreciate team members’ backgrounds nor take the time to explain concepts fully, leading to a potential loss of valuable feedback or novel ideas.

We asked ourselves what would help to facilitate effective communication. We decided to create a glossary of terms frequently used, or misused, by those working on the project. Team members defined terms within their scientific field with each entry checked by non-specialists to ensure entries were understandable and accessible. This allowed us to communicate more freely in the knowledge that all team members had a common vocabulary, or at least a document to refer to as necessary.

Clear communication

To enable more precise communication we developed a controlled vocabulary detailing terms that require considerate usage. For instance, kilobit (kbit), kilobyte (kB) and kilo base pairs (kb or kbp) can be easily confused if context, audience and correct abbreviations are not considered. To allow precision during technical conversations, terms with a novel or specific meaning in a DNA-storage context are included.

Common technical terminology exists between many scientific fields; however, this often has very different meanings. For example, barcode, unique molecular identifier, molecular barcode and index may share a fundamental similarity but can have subtle or vast differences depending upon the context or audience.

The communication challenges we struggle with are not subject-specific and many teams will experience similar difficulties.

As modern research projects often span multiple scientific disciplines, interdisciplinary teams are increasingly common. The communication challenges we struggle with are not subject-specific and many teams will experience similar difficulties. Having benefited from our glossary of terms and controlled vocabulary we thought others may benefit from our general approach, or indeed offer new solutions.

Wishing to share our approach in such a way that allowed contribution from those working on DNA-storage applications and the wider scientific community, we decided to hold our glossary and controlled vocabulary on a cloud storage system. It is our goal, if there is sufficient interest or need, to have an open Wikipedia-style workspace promoting greater participation, commentary, updating and editing (as has already been suggested on one of the open referee reports).

We felt an F1000Research article describing our approach would enable us to share it with a wider audience. Preparing that article prompted us to think about how poor communication can have such a detrimental impact on productivity, quality of work and, importantly, peer review. Peer review is a crucial quality improvement measure; however, as science becomes increasingly multi-disciplinary the expertise to evaluate a body of work as a whole is difficult to find.

Plain language

What would help facilitate the peer review process for both reviewers and authors? As a first step, we suggest the inclusion of plain-language summaries for the whole-publication or for specialised technical aspects of a publication.  Plain-language summaries are simple to include in publications and promote more thought and consideration into the language used.

We felt an F1000Research article describing our approach would enable us to share it with a wider audience.

Occasionally explaining concepts using more simplified language could also potentially help ensure that team members are all on the same page during technical discussions. Something that we briefly mention in the article is the danger of misunderstandings passing unnoticed, which is difficult to spot. We would have benefited from this during several of our earlier in-depth discussions in which it only later became apparent that we were each discussing slightly different concepts – a memorable one of these being about barcodes/indexes.

Our F1000Research article outlines some of the approaches we have taken to improve both verbal and written communication within a DNA-storage context. We hope that others may benefit from our approach and that our article will begin a wider discussion as to how we can effectively and creatively improve communication and promote productive peer review.