Publication Patterns of Academic Health Sciences Librarians

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Publication Patterns of Academic Health Sciences
Librarians

• Patricia C. Higginbottom
• Tracy E. Powell
• Jack T. Smith, Jr.
• Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
• University of Alabama at Birmingham

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Why the Interest?

• Librarians at LHL have non tenure-earning faculty
  appointments
• Achieve higher academic rank via the promotion
  process
• Promotions committees include colleagues from
  outside the library
• Many disciplines have standard expected for
  promotion

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What Would We Like to Know?

• Average publication rates for academic health
  sciences librarians
• Author order-are there patterns and do they mean
  anything?
• Publishing patterns by rank
• Publishing patterns by institution

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How Can We Find Out?

• Review literature on what has been done
• What do we need that hasnt been investigated?
• Develop methodology to answer the specific
  questions we have
• What is doable?
• Gather the data and see what it tells us
• Can we answer all of our questions?

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What Answers are in the Literature?

• Type of publication/where published
• Type of librarian author
• Type of article published
• Number of articles published by an author
• Factors influencing research and publication
• Mularski, BMLA, 1991

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Methodology

• Identify potential pool of academic health
  sciences library (AHSL) authors
• Identify AHSL authors of journal articles
• Search for additional articles by those authors
• Include enough time to get valid representation
• Examine data by author and by institution

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Methodology

• Compare like items by excluding the following
• letters to the editor
• editorials
• reviews of books, media, software
• obituaries
• proceedings of annual meetings
• introductions to symposia
• prefaces
• oral histories
• book chapters

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What Did We Gather?

• Potential author pool is AAHSL professional staff
• Maximum of 160 institutions over 13-year period
• Average of AAHSL potential authors in time
  period is 1449
• Qualifying articles to develop published author
  pool
• from TSQ, MRSQ, BMLA/JMLA

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What Did We Gather?

• Searched for journal articles by identified
  authors in other databases
• Lib Lit, ISTA
• Tallied number of articles and number of author
  instances
• Compiled data by individual author and by
  institution

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What Have We Found?

• From 1990-2002, 536 AAHSL librarians appeared as
  author 1488 times, in 1092 articles, in the
  library literature
• Most of the included articles had either 1 or 2
  authors
• The average articles/ librarians for all
  AAHSL institutions was 0.44 for 1990-2002
• The average articles/ librarians for
  published AAHSL institutions was 0.69 for
  1990-2002

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Qualifying and ISTA articles
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What Have We Found?

• Most professional staff at AAHSL member
  institutions did not publish in the library
  literature from 1990-2002
• An average of less than one article per
  professional position in the 13-year period is
  most common in AAHSL member institutions
• 65 of AAHSL librarians who have published have 1
  or 2 articles in the time period

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What Do We Have Left to Investigate?

• We have not yet examined the MEDLINE and CINAHL
  data for relevant articles
• We believe the number will be small and need to
  avoid skewing the data with false hits
• We were not able to determine faculty rank for
  most authors
• We have not determined if author position is
  relevant most articles had 1 or 2 authors

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Questions?

• Thank you