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1. Introduction
Nowadays, academic publication is considered a huge industry. One of the major tasks of academic professionals and researchers is to read and publish research papers. More than 1.5 million articles are published annually by 6 million academics in about 17,000 colleges (Bjork et al., 2009; Hyland, 2016). Moreover, 100,000 articles and reviews were published on the Web of Science alone between 2009 and 2015 (Heneberg, 2019). Research activities happen within these publications. Newly developed methods by scientists and researchers take a fairly long time to be used in practice by the non-researchers, industries or organizations, so there is an exceeding need for bridging the gap between science and practice (Lobb and Colditz, 2013). This gap which limits the information transfer rate has long been a concern (Wandersman et al., 2008). Research applications in practice should be considered a complex and multifaceted process (Kent and McCormack, 2010). Knowledge management is the systematic access to information and scientific resources that guarantees the right audience access to the appropriate information at the right time (O’dell and Grayson, 1998). To address this issue, a new application of repositories is proposed in this paper that suggests storing these methods as an easy to use and simplified webpage to be used by practitioners (nonscientists) to shorten the aforementioned gap. The method repositories can be used as a new knowledge management system that facilitates the use of research activities in a more accessible manner.
Developing method repositories in particular areas could be very helpful for the people involved in that field. For example, consider a doctor finding all the possible methods of breast cancer treatment in a Web-based cancer treatment method repository instead of searching and reading a huge number of scientific articles. As another example, consider a chemical engineer working in an industrial company and finding all the required methods of material synthesis to optimize the quality of products and lower the production expenses in a Web-based method repository of material synthesis.
Over the years, digital repositories have been designed to support libraries, bibliographic resources, student dissertations, conference papers and workshops, prints, multimedia contents, software and patents (Woodbury et al., 2004; Zamani and Izhar, 2018) but are mainly used for storing and retrieving documents such as...