Hi all
I'm trying to learn more about the kinds of research tasks people in bioinformatics and biomedical research still find unnecessarily repetitive, messy, or time-consuming.
My team has been building a free library of small research-oriented skills, and we already have 400+ of them. But honestly, the main thing we still need is not more ideas from ourselves, it's better input from real users.
So I wanted to ask:
If you could automate or simplify one annoying part of your workflow, what would it be?
This could be:
literature review / paper digestion data cleanup result interpretation repetitive analysis steps formatting / writing support troubleshooting messy workflows anything else that keeps wasting your time
I'd be especially interested in cases where:
existing tools are too generic current workflows still involve too much manual work the task is easy to mess up you've hacked together your own workaround, but it's not ideal
I'm not posting this as a product pitch so much as a genuine request for examples. Specific pain points, rough workflow descriptions, and "I wish something existed for X" are all helpful.
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I think you may want to take the time and list at least some tasks your group has already addressed. Given that you already have what you call 400+ small research-oriented skills, people might waste their time by suggesting stuff only for you to respond with "Been there, done that."
Thanks, that’s a fair point, and I probably should have framed that better.
We do already have 400+ small research-oriented skills, but they mostly fall into a few broad buckets rather than 400 completely different problems. A lot of them are around literature review / evidence synthesis, data analysis and interpretation, meta-analysis and research workflows, scientific writing support, and troubleshooting repetitive research tasks.
What I’m really trying to learn here is not just whether a task has been “addressed” in some form, but where current tools still feel too generic, too manual, or too fragile in real use. Those “it exists, but it still kind of sucks” workflow pain points are especially useful for us to hear about.
I agree with Mensur Dlakic that you should show at least a few of your "best" skills so that we can evaluate whether it is worth spending time with it at all.
Maybe what you call "skill" is something trivial, or maybe it is does save time. Since you show none there is no way to determine that.