Have the Most Relevant and Answerable Research Questions Facing Librarians Changed Between 2001 and 2006?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives - To examine the similarities and differences between research questions asked by librarians in 2001 to those posed in 2006, and to explore to what extent the published research supports the questions being asked. Methods - Questions collected in 2001 by members of the Evidence-Based Librarianship Implementation Committee (EBLIC) of the MLA Research Section were compared with questions collected in 2006 at a cross-sectoral seminar introducing evidence based library and information practice to Australian librarians. Questions from each list were categorized using the domains of librarianship proposed by Crumley and Koufogiannakis in 2001, and examined with reference to a content analysis of the library and information studies (LIS) research published in 2001 by Koufogiannakis, Slater, and Crumley in 2004. Results - In 2001 and 2006 the most commonly asked questions were in the domain of management (29%, 33%), followed by education (24%, 18.5%). In 2001 questions in the marketing/promotion category ranked lowest (1%), however representation was much greater in 2006 (18.5%) ranking an equal second with education. Questions in the lowest ranked domain in 2006 (collections, 6%) had been more common in 2001 where collections ranked third, representing 19% of the questions. Koufogiannakis, Slater, and Crumley’s content analysis of LIS research published in 2001 revealed that the most popular domain for research was information access and retrieval (38%) followed by collections (24%). Only 1% of published LIS research (seven articles) was in the domain of marketing/promotion. In contrast, 36 articles originally assigned to one of the six established domains could more appropriately have been included in a proposed new domain of professional issues. Conclusion - The disparity between questions being asked by practitioners and the evidence being generated by researchers suggests that the research-practice gap is still an issue. A content analysis of more recently published LIS research would be a useful comparison to Koufogiannakis, Slater, and Crumley’s analysis of research published in 2001.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.116 | 0.365 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".