Browsing by Author "Thuna, Mindy"

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    Creative Convergence: Conducting a Systematic Review Project Through Cross-Institutional, Distance Collaboration
    Pannabecker, Virginia; Ching Dennison, Carolyn; Farrell, Alison; Gore, Genevieve; Holyoke, Assako; Machel, Viola; Marton, Christine; O'Brien, Kelly K.; Swanberg, Stephanie; Thuna, Mindy (2014-10-30)
    Objective: To reflect on a cross-institutional systematic review project: What are effective collaboration methods for geographically dispersed research teams? Methods: Conduct a scoping literature review on effective methods for cross-institutional, distance research team collaboration considering: different institutional resources and policies and dispersed locations and time zones. Collect systematic review team member perspectives regarding: what worked best, what each might do differently, and recommendations for others. Identify themes from the team results and synthesize team results with literature review results for a set of recommended best practices. Results: Medical librarians joined systematic review teams for an MLA Research Section initiative to address health librarianship research questions. Ten librarians were on our team, including a team leader, mostly from academic institutions, collaborating from Hawaii, the continental U.S., and Canada. We identified benefits including diverse perspectives, wide-ranging experience in healthcare education and librarianship, and expansive access to health sciences literature through our multiple institutions; challenges such as developing a project plan and timeline from scratch; lessons learned; and recommendations for future projects. Conclusion: In today’s healthcare environment, we strive to produce the highest quality results and to include diverse perspectives to strengthen our research. Healthcare professionals, including medical librarians, increasingly interact in online environments with geographically dispersed research teams. Find out what we learned from this project: what worked best, what we would do differently, and our recommendations for successful distance collaboration.
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    Instructional methods used by health sciences librarians to teach evidence-based practice (EBP): a systematic review
    Swanberg, Stephanie M.; Dennison, Carolyn Ching; Farrell, Alison; Machel, Viola; Marton, Christine; O'Brien, Kelly K.; Pannabecker, Virginia; Thuna, Mindy; Holyoke, Assako Nitta (Medical Library Association, 2016-07)
    BACKGROUND: Librarians often teach evidence-based practice (EBP) within health sciences curricula. It is not known what teaching methods are most effective. METHODS: A systematic review of the literature was conducted searching CINAHL, EMBASE, ERIC, LISTA, PubMed, Scopus, and others. Searches were completed through December 2014. No limits were applied. Hand searching of Medical Library Association annual meeting abstracts from 2009–2014 was also completed. Studies must be about EBP instruction by a librarian within undergraduate or graduate health sciences curricula and include skills assessment. Studies with no assessment, letters and comments, and veterinary education studies were excluded. Data extraction and critical appraisal were performed to determine the risk of bias of each study. RESULTS: Twenty-seven studies were included for analysis. Studies occurred in the United States (20), Canada (3), the United Kingdom (1), and Italy (1), with 22 in medicine and 5 in allied health. Teaching methods included lecture (20), small group or one-on-one instruction (16), computer lab practice (15), and online learning (6). Assessments were quizzes or tests, pretests and posttests, peer-review, search strategy evaluations, clinical scenario assignments, or a hybrid. Due to large variability across studies, meta-analysis was not conducted. DISCUSSION: Findings were weakly significant for positive change in search performance for most studies. Only one study compared teaching methods, and no one teaching method proved more effective. Future studies could conduct multisite interventions using randomized or quasi-randomized controlled trial study design and standardized assessment tools to measure outcomes. DATA FILES: In September 2017, the team was asked by the Journal of the Medical Library Association Editorial Board "if they would send [the JMLA Editorial Board] working group the data that would be needed to reproduce the results described in their articles" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5886497/). The team identified the study data files, cleaned them, and sent them to JMLA. However, as this was simply a query and experiment by the Editorial Board, the files were not added to the published article. As these files are now prepared for sharing, they have been added to this study's VTechWorks institutional repository record in August, 2018.
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    Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Civil and Environmental Engineering Scholars
    Cooper, Danielle; Springer, Rebecca; Benner, Jessica G.; Bloom, David; Carrillo, Erin; Carroll, Alexander; Chang, Bertha; Chen, Xiaoju; Daix, Daix; Dommermuth, Emily; Figueiredo, Rachel; Haas, Jennifer; Hafner, Carly A.; Hayes, Whitney; Henshilwood, Angela; Krogman, Alexandra Lyn Craig |Kuglitsch, Rebecca Zuege; Lanteri, Sabine; Lewis, Abbey; Li, Lisha; Marsteller, Matthew R.; Melvin, Tom; Michelson-Ambelang, Todd; Mischo, William H.; Nickles, Colin; Pannabecker, Virginia; Rascoe, Fred; Schlembach, Mary C.; Shen, Yi; Smith, Erin M.; Spence, Michelle; Stacy-Bates, Kris; Thomas, Erin; Thompson, Larry; Thuna, Mindy; Wiley, Christie A.; Young, Sarah; Yu, Siu Hong (Ithaka S+R, 2019-01-16)
    Ithaka S+R’s Research Support Services Program investigates how the research support needs of scholars vary by discipline. In 2017 and 2018 Ithaka S+R examined the changing research methods and practices of civil and environmental engineering scholars in the United States with the goal of identifying services to better support them. The goal of this report is to provide actionable findings for the organizations, institutions, and professionals who support the research processes of civil and environmental engineering scholars. The project was undertaken collaboratively with research teams at 11 academic libraries in the United States and Canada.[1] We are delighted to have the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) as project partner and sponsor. Angela Cochran, Associate Publisher at ASCE, served as a project advisor. The project also relied on scholars who are leaders in the field to engage in an advisory capacity. We thank Franz-Joseph Ulm (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Antonio Nanni (University of Miami), Anand Puppala (University of Texas at Arlington), and Roger Ghanem (University of Southern California) for their thoughtful contributions. Many of the challenges civil and environmental engineering researchers face are shared with other STEM disciplines – a competitive funding landscape, a fraught peer review system, complex data management requirements. Yet this applied field presents unique opportunities for academic support service providers. Fundamentally focused on finding practicable solutions to real-world problems, civil and environmental engineering is highly collaborative, interdisciplinary, and close to relevant industries. Yet these synergies are largely built on old-fashioned research infrastructures. Inefficient systems for sharing data impede innovation, tools for discovering data and gray literature are inadequate, and career incentives discourage investment in the industry partnerships that shape the field’s future directions. Successful interventions will need to recognize and leverage the field’s strength in building personal, targeted, collaborative relationships, both within academia and between academia and industry. This report describes the distinctive ways in which civil and environmental engineering scholars conduct their research and draws out broad implications for academic libraries, universities, publishers, research technology developers, and others.