Benching for Health Literature Searches

Email from Paula Clark, Health Services Research Librarian, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Toronto, Ontario

I received many requests to post the responses for benchmarking literature searches in the health sciences, and I’m happy to share.

I didn’t receive or find a specific guidelines for establishing timelines/hours for a search, no doubt because of the variability of any search topic.

However PRESS (Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies) is a tool recently developed by a team at CADTH (Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technology in Health) that provides a checklist to assess the quality of search strategies: http://www.cadth.ca/index.php/en/publication/781

Here are the responses:

- there may be a few studies that could be helpful. At one time I did what ship radio shack people do, and wrote down every 5 and 15 minute intervals what I did. (ship radio operators log every minute and every 5 minutes what they hear on the shortwaves.) Then produced a report as to what kinds of work I did, what the percentage was for the week of each activity. Also by having the time logged as well, you get a good idea of the heaviest times of the day (well, when the most requests come in.)
http://www.annals.org/content/144/10/742.full
http://www.rcjournal.com/contents/05.10/05.10.0578.pdf

- Both MLA and VALNET have done benchmarking. VALNET never differentiated in types of searches. We just counted searches.

- [re: MLA Benchmarking project] The last Benchmarking survey was published in 2008 and we would normally do another one in 2011. The Board will be discussing this at their meeting in October, but for now we have the 2008 data.

- I don’t know that you can benchmark actual hours spent/required, but you might be able to benchmark timelines. I work just on orthopaedic practice guidelines—fairly well-defined, right? But it is all over the map depending on the topic selected, limits, scope, etc. each work group decides on. However, for establishing the guideline development timetable, we regularly budget at least one month for the search and one month for the abstract review and article retrieval. Within that timeline, I might spend more or fewer hours each guideline, depending on the search parameters

And here is a list of resources I came across that were helpful/interesting:

MLA Benchmarking Network:

Website: http://www.mlanet.org/resources/benchmark07/definitions.html

Article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1435860/

Library Activity Benchmarking Table : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1435842/table/i1536-5050-094-02-0118-t01/
(taken from this report on the results of the MLA Benchmarking Network: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1435842)

Standards :

Standards for Hospital Libraries 2007:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2268237/

Articles :

The Value of Hospital Library Benchmarking
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/1021028687-7766837/content~db=all~content=a903922501~frm=titlelink

The Buck Starts Here : Using In-House Reports to Market your Library
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a902276607

Using standards to make your case: examples from the medical library community
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1728032&show=abstract&

A listserv about scholarly communication

If you want to read lively comment, posting, etc. about scholarly communication, you may consider joining the liblicense listserv. The list serve is maintained by Yale and you can sign up at: http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/email.shtml

Fakes, Parodies and Hoaxes on the Internet

Click on the link below, you will find a guide on bogus websites created by Sue MacDonald.

http://zakta.com/zakta/view_1_5_3426_Fakes,_Parodies_and_Hoaxes_on_the_Internet#login_form_anchor

New OvidSP

Some new features in the latest OvidSP

1. You may switch between Search, Journals, Books, and My Workspace anytime you want without losing the searches you have done under the Search function.

2. The Filter By widget on the right-hand side allows you to filter your results by publication year, subject, author, journal, and publication type. If you would like the filtered results to show up in the Search History area, you can simply click on “Add to Search History” which is underneath “Filter By”.

3. “Keep Selected” feature is nice. After you select the desired results, you just need to click on “Keep Selected” and those selected results will be kept and shown in the Search History area.

4. New results management options: users can export their results to Word document, PDF, text file, Citavi, EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manger, RefWorks, BRS/Tagged, Reprint/Medlars, RIS, or XML.

5. New email features: you may choose to email your results in one of the eight styles: AMA, APA, Chicago (Author,Date), Chicago (Humanities), MLA, Vancouver, Ovid Labled Citation, or Ovid Citation.

6. The “drag-and-drop” feature: To drop it to the desired place, you have to make sure that the red stop icon () has changed into green tick ().

7. The neatest thing is My Workspace. There are four components in My Workspace:

1) My Projects. In My Projects, users can store citations and/or full-text documents they found in Ovid databases, and they can also add citations and upload full-text documents from outside Ovid databases. The maximum storage space for items from outside Ovid is 50 MB. Uploaded files will be kept at Ovid servers. The Upload File function can be turned off if the institution does not want their staff to upload files to servers that are outside of their organization. A project will be moved to Trash a year after its creation date and will be kept in Trash for a month. After that, the project will be deleted permanently. But a notice will be sent to the account owner eleven months after the creation date of the project and the account owner can choose to activate the project to prevent it from being deleted. There are no collaboration features with My Projects for now, but it is something that Ovid will add in the future.

2) My Searches and Alerts. All the saved searches and alerts created in the old version are kept here. You actually can add the auto alerts created in the old version to My Projects if you like.

3) My eTOCs. All the eTOCs created in the old version are kept here.

4) Install Toolbar. You may install the Ovid toolbar from here. I could not install it in my IE, but I was successful with FireFox. The Ovid Toolbar only works after you have logged into the new OvidSP. With Ovid Toolbar, you may add citations and/or full-text documents when you are working with resources that are outside Ovid databases, e.g. PubMed, or the Internet, etc.

There is a side-by-side screen comparison of Old OvidSP and New OvidSP available at:
http://www.ovid.com/site/pdf/side_by_side/sidebysidecomparison-April5_newheader.pdf

If you would like to attend the training sessions, you can find the information at:
http://www.ovid.com/site/resources/training_ovidsp.jsp

Grey Matters - CADTH

CADTH Workshop

• The link to CADTH Grey Matters Workshop Webcast:

http://events.startcast.com/events6/Default.aspx?EID=cb7423b7-1be2-482b-848f-a35871639801

To access the Webcast, people need to fill out the registration form first. After the registration form being submitted, the Webcast will open right away.

• The link to the Grey Matters Checklist:

http://www.cadth.ca/index.php/en/cadth/products/grey-matters