Library Instruction in the Curriculum

Librarians collaborate with nursing faculty to ensure first year PhD students are familiar with library resources and services. A series of four classes are taught by librarians including database use, finding data, and design principles for posters and presentations.

Over the course of the year-long Physician Associate program research curriculum, librarians deliver four class sessions and facilitate twelve small-group workshops. The students learn the tenets of evidence-based practice and literature searching for both patient care and research, with the series culminating in comprehensive literature analyses to inform thesis proposals.

Librarians provide critical information to medical students entering the clerkship training period during their precedes. In this transitional time, librarians equip students with useful Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) tools that support their clinical care training. Librarians also share valuable training to ensure students can successfully search and locate evidence to apply to patient care. 

Working with the program director, librarians develop video tutorials to share with EMPH students ahead of live workshops. This helps students learn key concepts before joining 30-minute synchronous sessions on topics such as searching in Google Scholar and finding grey literature and gives them materials they can reference later in the course.

Medical students in the Medical Approach to the Patient (MAP) clerkship are required to complete an assignment where they write a patient case, identify research questions, devise search strategies, and locate evidence to inform that patient's care. Librarians provide timely feedback on the student's work.

Instructors and teaching fellows should encourage students to consult with librarians about class assignments, term papers, capstones, and theses. When instructors set aside class time for groups to collaborate on long-term projects, librarians can work with each group to hear about their progress and address information barriers they are experiencing.

Librarians partner with the Center for Medical Education to teach future clinician-educators in the Education Scholar Fellowship each year. Librarians teach four 2-hour sessions on topics including approaches to searching the health professions literature, training on citation management programs, offering a mentored searching workshop, and discussing evidence synthesis projects in medical education.

After delivering a lecture about how to find and evaluate grey literature and steer clear of health misinformation, a librarian led a roleplay activity where students formed groups of five and assumed the roles of social media giant, journalist, government official, health practitioner, and layperson, then discussed what motivates each role, who is most vulnerable, and how they all can work together. 

• Annotated bibliographies
• Devising a search strategy
  • Concept tables
  • Keyword combinations
  • Citation chaining
  • Improving a search by making it more specific or more sensitive
• Database searching
  • Databases containing biomedical literature
  • Databases containing social science & multidisciplinary literature
  • Demo of advanced features of a favorite database
  • Which bibliographic database is best for your project
• Types of literature reviews
  • Reviews suitable for the introduction of term paper
  • Systematic review methods
  • Scoping review methods
  • Realist Review methods
  • Interpretive Literature Reviews
• Searching for certain PH electives
  • Searching for biomedical engineering literature and data
  • Searching for literature and data on public health and the arts
• An intro to graduate-level research for the BA/BS-MPH cohort
• Finding and using public health data
• Using citation managers
• Using citation managers for collaborations
• Why we cite (ethics of citation)
• Searching for (psychometric) instruments: instrument text, validation, translations, alternatives, and permissions
• Finding and evaluating grey lit
• Searching databases of news coverage
• Working with government documents
• Searching for literature featuring voices from the global south
• Images + copyright
• Data sources for metaresearch about publishing
• Evaluating search strategies in published reviews + metaresearch
• Media coverage of science/medicine
• Create a reading list starting from your favorite document(s)
• Reporting guidelines: for authors, readers, or reviewers
• Searching for alternatives to animal use in science
• Reception: what do other scholars say about your favorite document
• Research data management basics
• Information for entrepreneurs (industry and market research)
• Geospatial data sources for social determinants of health
• Avoid these common mistakes with tabular data
• Setting up alerts for your favorite topics/authors/papers