Suchergebnisse

OBJECTIVE: This study explores the variety of information formats used and audiences targeted by public health faculty in the process of disseminating research. METHODS: The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with twelve faculty members in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, asking them about their research practices, habits, and preferences. RESULTS: Faculty scholars disseminate their research findings in a variety of formats intended for multiple audiences, including not only their peers in academia, but also public health practitioners, policymakers, government and other agencies, and community partners. CONCLUSION: Librarians who serve public health faculty should bear in mind the diversity of faculty's information needs when designing and improving library services and resources, particularly those related to research dissemination and knowledge translation. Promising areas for growth in health sciences libraries include supporting data visualization, measuring the impact of non-scholarly publications, and promoting institutional repositories for dissemination of research.

This case discusses how we used scoping review methodology to map the literature in an emergent area of research, "structural change" public health interventions. Scoping reviews are similar to systematic reviews in both scale and rigor; both of these literature review methodologies are comprehensive approaches to reviewing the literature on a topic. However, while a systematic review attempts to answer a specific, targeted research question, a scoping review is designed to map and categorize all of the literature on a broad topic. For this reason, it is an excellent method to employ in emergent research areas, in which researchers have not yet conducted systematic reviews or otherwise attempted to record the entirety of a scholarly conversation. In this case report, we discuss advantages and disadvantages to the methodology, as well as the lessons we learned from our experience, and our recommendations for researchers who utilize this method. We encountered challenges including time limitations, finding a balance between a search strategy that was neither too narrow nor too broad, and adjusting the search throughout the process to accommodate new vocabulary terms as we discovered them.