Publication Patterns of Academic Health Sciences Librarians

Authors: Patricia C. Higginbottom , Tracy E. Powell , Jack Smith ; Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Purpose: Describe the publication patterns of faculty librarians in a health sciences library setting to determine the number of publications and to identify other trends in publishing by faculty health science librarians.

Data Sources: Journals: BMLA , Medical Reference Services Quarterly , and Technical Services Quarterly . Databases: MEDLINE, CINAHL, LISA, Library Lit.

Study Selection: Articles published in the years 1990 through 2002 from the journals listed in the Data Sources. Excluded were letters to the editor, editorials, reviews of books, media or software, obituaries, proceedings of annual meetings, introductions to symposia, prefaces and oral histories. Authors identified as academic health sciences librarians were compiled into a master author list. Those names were then searched in the databases listed in Data Sources to compile a comprehensive listing of publications by the authors in question.

Data Extraction: A Data Collection Sheet was developed to gather descriptive elements of the article and each author connected with that article. EndNote was used to keep track of the articles included in the study. Spreadsheets were developed for analysis of the data. Data about the number of academic health sciences faculty was collected from the AAHSL Statistics.

 Main Findings: The researchers are continuing to collect and analyze data.