#blogjune Day 16: Want to become an even better, more evidence-based library and information professional? Practice doing this.
Transcript
G’day and welcome to this video series chatting about all things evidence-based library and information practice. I’m Alisa Howlett the Coordinator of Evidence-Based Practice at the University of Southern Queensland library. In other videos I’ve talked about how to get started in becoming evidence-based as a library and information professional.
This video will talk about getting even better at becoming evidence-based and that is by practicing assessing or appraising evidence, and something that I’ve increasingly discovered over the last couple of years as an evidence summary writer for the Evidence-Based Library & Information Practice journal.
In this role I have to pull apart studies and evidence presented in research articles. And by doing these or writing these evidence summaries, these skills of assessing the validity, reliability and applicability of evidence have become much much sharper. This is especially important for decision making in weighing evidence, decreasing the weighting possibly or even weeding out evidence in the process. This is where an understanding of research methods really come out to shine and that why it’s really important.
Become more evidence-based by appraising
Practicing assessing or appraising evidence, you can do this by asking a few questions and they are,
- Is the research question or aim clear?
- Does the method fit the aim?
- What do the findings or results tell me? Or what does the evidence tell me?
- And, what doesn’t the evidence tell me? What are the gaps?
Also, there are tools that you can use to help step through this process of appraisal. Starting to hone these appraisal and assessing skills with research has helped me to apply these techniques to other sources of evidence. This has just been my experience. Starting with local evidence all in different places, it can be a bit trickier. With a research article, it’s all there written in the one spot.
Become an even better evidence-based library and information professional by assessing or appraising evidence. Essentially, becoming data literate. Yes that is our job.
So until next time, take care and cheers.
Other appraisal resources and tools
Questions?
If you have any questions at all about EBLIP, do get in touch. I’ll try to address them in this video series (or a future blog post).
You can also view Day 16 (Becoming more evidence-based) video here.
Catch up on all the videos here.
