BackgroundInitiatives that offer help to primary care practitioners interested in research are ubiquitous throughout the UK.Whether these initiatives are formulated as research networks or as support units, they are all challenged with matching their activities with the existing skills and perspectives of participating practitioners.In 1997 the Wessex Primary Care Research Network developed a simple tool to assess research skills and experience so that we could plan our educational programme to re ect the learning needs of our multi professional membership.The 'Research Spider' is a star-plot style questionnaire for self-completion.To ensure face and construct validity the questionnaire was developed in consultation with practice-based researchers and academics.It has 10 scales (or limbs) relating to discrete components of the research process upon which members rate their research experience from 1 = no experience to 5 = very experienced (Figure 1). EvaluationThis novel approach to data collection has been formally evaluated among members of our network.To con rm its validity we tested the con-
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Smith et al. (2002) studied this question.