Finding health information – a researcher’s perspective Sarah Condell PhD HSE Nursing & Midwifery R&D Lead
Who am I? Nurse & Midwife (8 years in practice) Educator (11 years) Educational Management (3 years) Academia (1 year) Research Development (10 years) Research & Development (3 years) ► Clinical Effectiveness – EBP.
Late career, mid-life researcher! CINAHL catalogues and index cards to Research repositories and referencing software Library User (professionally and personally) and Information Consumer!
BUT not a typical researcher! (conducting research is not my primary role as no strategic focus on research in ONMSD) Rather than deep area of interest – broadness Person vs content focused searching Topics (N&M, Research Capacity Building, Patient Safety & HSR) Disciplines (Sociology, Psychology) Professionals (N&M, AHP, Medics)
Broad Experiences Finding literature Finding peer reviewers Appraising research proposals* Synthesising literature Commissioning studies or systematic reviews* Data analysis* Publishing Developing a repository (!)
User Characteristics: 1Habitual Tendency to use the known – what, who etc New habits require time to develop Working with old systems is a barrier Style versus substance Responding to stimulus alerts of journal listing, Google scholar, research scans, other alerts – CHAIN.
Versus: User Characteristics: 2Fickle Ease of access and use Timeliness – peer review vs grey (↑) Ego – ResearchGate Curiosity & competitiveness
Experience of Repositories – 4S Strategic – live mid 2009 Sweat & toil – 100+ abstracts Sustainability – NCNM closed end 2011 Sad
Thank You And enjoy the bank holiday…