Talking about publishing (2)

2. Developing a strategic publishing and presentation plan

To me, being strategic about publishing means being prepared in every step of the process.

Identify the potential publication venue.
As mentioned earlier, it is important to develop a list of key journals in one’s field of research. To consider what journals to include, here are a few ideas discussed in the Webinar titled “SIG III: Getting Published in Reputable International Journals and Other Publications”: which journals do you consider prestigious; which are highly cited in your specialization; where do your senior colleagues present and publish; and what is the journal’s impact factor. Once you narrow down a few choices, for each journal: read the table of contents of the journal where you want to submit – at least a year’s worth (who and what they’re publishing, there may be a special issues); check to see if your key terms are indexed by the journal and check to see where the journal is indexed; and check the background of the editor and the editorial board. When the list is complete, you may choose one journal from it as a target venue for each manuscript you start working on.
Prepare the manuscript.
A research project, especially a complex one, may produce more than one publication. As we complete the project, we need to think about how to carve out the different pieces and turn them into multiple publications. Then, we can set a timeline for writing the manuscripts one by one. Writing is often the most difficult part in the process. It takes time, discipline and persistence. The aforementioned Webinar had a few suggestions on honing one’s writing skills: avoid jargon, define major terms and concepts, use terms consistently, ask trusted colleagues for feedback, consider hiring a proof reader, read about writing, e.g., Virginia Tufte (Artful Sentences), Gopen & Swan (The science of scientific writing), practice writing, keep a journal (or a blog), and take advantage of the writing support provided by one’s institution.
The publication decision.
There are usually four decisions – accept as is, minor revision, major revision, and rejection. The first two are practically good news, so we will just talk about how to deal with the latter two. Major revision can be a mixed bag. Sometimes the editor can decide whether to accept your revision, and sometimes the revised manuscript has to go out for another round of peer review. As for the reviewers’ comments, we may not agree with all of them, or be able to address all of them. When deciding whether to continue with the revision or withdraw the submission, we need to consider how well we can address the reviewers’ comments in the revision, and whether it’s worth the time and effort. If we do decide on revising, we need to document how each point in the reviewers’ comments was addressed – if we couldn’t fully address a particular point, it’s necessary to provide a detailed explanation. Such a document is often required when resubmitting the revised manuscript. If the publication decision is rejection, we can still recycle the manuscript and find another venue to submit it. Handling major revision and rejection can be frustrating – the key is not to take it personally and develop a thick skin for criticism.

Talking about publishing (1)

I will be joining our Gateway PhD Program’s residency in the upcoming ASIS&T annual conference in Montreal, and I have been asked to talk to the doctoral students about publishing. I’d like to use this blog post to clear my thoughts and figure out what I’m going to say. I was given a couple of specific topics that need to be covered, which is helpful and I can organize my thoughts around them.

1. Selecting publication and presentation venues

There are usually two kinds of research journals – scholarly and professional. Both publish peer reviewed articles, written by and for people who have experience or expertise in a particular field, and both are respected for the research and information they provide about the topics they cover. The difference lies in the community of author and readers – for scholarly journals, author and readers are scholars and academic researchers, and their articles mostly serve the purpose of theoretical, methodological and knowledge advancement in a specific domain. Therefore, scholarly journals can be quite demanding when it comes to the rigor of a study’s research design. Professional journals focus more on the practical implications of research – how the published research can inform actual practice. Authors of professional journals are usually practitioners, who conduct research to address actual problems they encounter at work and publish about it.

Whether choosing a scholarly journal or a professional journal as the potential venue for publication, it’s important to have a clear idea of what our research is about and who we want to share this research with. It would be helpful to establish a list of four or five core journals that often cover our research areas and become familiar with their style and requirements (reviewing past issues would help). Before we start writing up our research, we can scan the list quickly and decide which journal we’d like to submit it to, and then complete the manuscript according that journal’s guidelines.

Conference is another venue where we can disseminate our research – there are also scholarly conferences and professional conferences, and the difference is similar to what’s discussed above. For conference presentations, some conferences require submissions of full papers that go through the peer review process, and some only require a proposal or an abstract to be viewed by a committee instead of peer reviewers. In some fields, conference proceedings have the same status as journal publications, while in some others, presenting at conferences is not valued as much as publishing in journals. Despite all the differences, conference is a great venue to have interactions with people who share our research interests and can offer us feedback on expanding/refining/improving our own research. Again, it’s important to identify one or two key conferences that welcome the types of research we do, and become familiar with their submission deadlines and requirements.

(to be continued)

Content analysis of LIS journal articles: What kinds of research are LIS practitioners engaged in

Over the years of teaching LIBR 285, Research Methods in Library and Information Science, I have always wanted to do one thing – to look at the journal publications of practitioner researchers and see what kinds of research they are producing, and how their research is informing the decisions they make in their practice. This will help my students better understand and appreciate the value of the research methods course, and therefore embrace it more willingly and enthusiastically. So I developed a grant proposal based on this idea and submitted it to the SJSU Research Scholarship and Creative Activity (RSCA) Program, and luckily it got funded, which means I will spend my next summer working on this project.

I plan to conduct a critical content analysis of the articles published in the core practitioner-oriented LIS research journals in the past decade, identifying the topics, trends, methods, strengths, and weaknesses of practitioner research. The content analysis will (1) determine the topics studied by practitioners; (2) provide a historical view of LIS research; (3) identify what methodological designs have been used and whether they have been used appropriately; and (4) ascertain exemplary areas of practitioner research as well as areas in need of improvement. Hopefully, findings from this study will yield insights for enhancing both research methods education for LIS students and research training for practitioners.

Speaking of content analysis, a book that has helped me a lot with this methodology is “Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology”, by Klaus Krippendorff. Especially the chapters on evaluative techniques offer some good ideas of addressing issues related to reliability and validity. Maybe it’s time to revisit the book before I start this project of analyzing journal articles.

(reposted from SLIS CIRI Blog)

Books about Research Methods (4)

If you are a LIS practitioner interested in learning more about qualitative research methods, G.E. Gorman and Peter Clayton’s book, “Qualitative Research for the Information Professional: A Practical Handbook” might be a good choice. It is a comprehensive manual of how to conduct qualitative research, and covers a variety of methods for qualitative data collection, analysis and reporting.

For researchers who know which specific qualitative research method to use, but aren’t sure about how to exactly go about it, this book would come in very handy. For example, we want to conduct a case study, but we don’t know the detailed procedures of using this method, reading Gorman and Clayton’s book will be quite helpful.

However, I find the book a little week on the research conception aspect. It talks little about how to identify research problems that could benefit from qualitative research. In order for people to truly understand when to use qualitative research to address a research problem, it would be helpful to provide more examples. The authors did provide a table outlining the distinctive features of qualitative research (e.g. the purpose is to contextualize, interpret and understand participant perspectives), but for each feature, it would’ve been helpful to use an existing study or two from the literature to illustrate it. Maybe for their next edition, they may consider incorporating more examples, so readers will have a more concrete idea as to how to determine whether qualitative research is appropriate for a particular research inquiry.

Overall, the book is written in a clear and concise fashion, and it’s a fast read too. I’d recommend it to people who want to know more about the technical details of using a specific qualitative method.

Phenomenology and LIS research

Phenomenology is a philosophy that qualitative researchers use to guide their own research. There are three schools of this phenomenology:

Edetic or descriptive phenomenology, guided by the work of Husserl
Hermeneutics, also referred to as interpretive or existential phenomenology, guided by the work of Heidegger and Gadmaer
The Dutch (Utrecht) school of phenomenology, which combines descriptive and interpretive phenomenology and raws on the work of Van Manean and Others.

An article I recently read (Dowling, M. & Cooney, A. (2012). Research approaches related to phenomenology: Negotiating a complex landscape. Nurse Researcher, 20(2), 21-27.) provided a detailed explanation of the three different perspectives and research approaches, and how they should be applied by nurse researchers.

One key difference between Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology and Heidegger’s interpretive phenomenology is that Husserl believed that a phenomenon and its essence can be objectively studied, requiring researchers to bracket out their perceived reality of world, whereas Heidegger rejected the notion of bracketing, claiming that a researcher cannot separate description from his her own interpretation. This difference bears resemblance to what distinguishes positivism from interpretivism. Researchers (at least nurse researchers nowadays) are trying to find the middle ground and focus more on understanding the reality of their experiences to the person as they engage with the phenomenon rather than the more objective reality of the nature of the phenomenon itself. In other words, phenomenology is most useful when the task at hand is to understand an experience as it is understood by those who are having it.

Reading this article made me want to find out how phenomenological research is done in LIS. I did a keyword search in Library Literature & Information Science Fulltext and came up with 32 results. Some were book reviews, some were reflection pieces and some others were empirical studies. Here is the list of citations – it will be very helpful if I ever teach a course on qualitative research and need to put together a list of class readings.

Burns, C., & Bossaller, J. (2012). Communication overload: a phenomenological inquiry into academic reference librarianship. Journal Of Documentation, 68(5), 597-617.
Chen, K., & Huang, I. (2012). Library Use by Medical Students Engaging in Problem-based Learning: A Taiwanese Case Study. Libri: International Journal Of Libraries & Information Services, 62(3), 248-258.
Budd, J. (2012). Phenomenological Critical Realism: A Practical Method for LIS. Journal Of Education For Library & Information Science, 53(1), 69-80.
Klentzin, J. (2010). Collective Success: A Phenomenological Case Study of Ohio Public Libraries. Public Library Quarterly, 29(4), 293-319.
Budd, J. M., Hill, H., & Shannon, B. (2010). Inquiring into the Real: A Realist Phenomenological Approach. Library Quarterly, 80(3), 267-284.
Hultgren, F. (2013). The stranger’s tale: information seeking as an outsider activity. Journal Of Documentation, 69(2), 275-294.
Veletsianos, G., & Kimmons, R. (2013). Scholars and faculty members’ lived experiences in online social networks. Internet & Higher Education, 1643-50.
Pietras, M., & Robinson, L. (2012). Three views of the “musical work”: bibliographical control in the music domain. Library Review, 61(8/9), 551-560.
Stephens, M. (2008). The Pragmatic Biblioblogger: Examining the Motivations and Observations of Early Adopter Librarian Bloggers. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 13(4), 311-345.
Budd, J. M. (2008). Cognitive Growth, Instruction, and Student Success. College & Research Libraries, 69(4), 319-330.
Templeton, T. (2008). Placing the Library: An Argument for the Phenomenological and Constructivist Approach to the Human Geography of the Library. Library Quarterly, 78(2), 195-209.
Julien, H., & Hoffman, C. (2008). Information Literacy Training in Canada’s Public Libraries. Library Quarterly, 78(1), 19-41.
Antell, K., & Engel, D. (2006). Conduciveness to Scholarship: The Essence of Academic Library as Place. College & Research Libraries, 67(6), 536-560.
Dalbello, M. (2005). A Phenomenological Study of an Emergent National Digital Library, Part I: Theory and Methodological Framework. Library Quarterly, 75(4), 391-420.
Brown, J., & Duke, T. (2005). Librarian and faculty collaborative instruction: A phenomenological self-study. Research Strategies, 20(3), 171-190.
Limberg, L., & Alexandersson, M. (2003). The School Library as a Space for Learning. School Libraries Worldwide, 9(1), 1-15.
Watson, J. (2001). Making sense of the stories of experience: methodology for research and teaching. Journal Of Education For Library & Information Science, 42(2), 137-148.
Horn, J. (1998). Qualitative research literature: a bibliographic essay. Library Trends, 46(4), 602-615.
Saab, D. J., & Riss, U. V. (2011). Information as ontologization. Journal Of The American Society For Information Science & Technology, 62(11), 2236-2246.

Books about Research Methods (2)

One of my favorite professors in my PhD program, Dr. Barbara Wildemuth, published a research methods book in 2009, titled “Applications of Social Research Methods to Questions in Information and Library Science”. This book divides the chapters into different stages of conducting research – formulating the research question, establishing the research and sampling design, collecting data, and analyzing data. Each chapter focuses on a particular design (e.g. case studies, longitudinal studies) or a specific method (e.g. semi-structured interviews, qualitative content analysis). What I like most about this book is that for each chapter, two to three exemplar studies using the research design or method discussed in that chapter were carefully critiqued, which provides a contextual and concrete way to understand how to successfully employ the design/method in a research study.

The book is intended for a wide variety of audience – doctoral/master’s students that are learning to conduct research, practitioners that are interested in carrying out research studies, and experienced researchers that are considering a method they are not familiar with. I use several of its chapters as readings for my own research methods class and students often find them helpful. I use it as a reference book for my own research as well.

Oh, by the way, I co-wrote two of the chapters in this book. Maybe I should’ve opened with that? 🙂

Students’ research ideas from LIBR 285 Research Methods in LIS

The spring semester is officially over. There is one thing I always do before diving into the joy of summer – gathering the research ideas my students had in the Research Methods class and putting them into a list. I used to do this in an Excel file, but now, documenting them on this blog seems a better idea. So here we go:

What barriers exist that inhibit parents of elementary school children from utilizing public library materials and services?
What motivates patrons to use tagging features in library catalogs? Do different tagging interfaces make a difference?
What connection, if any, does the age of a school library collection have upon student use of the library, both in terms of visits and circulation? In addition, are there specific genres/subject areas in which currency has a greater impact?
Are public libraries attracting new digital users through mobile library services?
Do academic libraries lend more support to group studying, or to individual studying, or do they support the two types of studying equally?
Do LGBTQ young adults have access to LGBTQ collections and programs in San Francisco Bay Area public libraries?
How does library jargon on reference desk signage affect student recognition of in-person reference services at the CSULB Library?
What are best practices for developing and administering Drupal user permissions and roles for library websites?
What are the challenges users face when browsing and transferring library ebooks into their ereaders?
How does the content and visibility of online Interlibrary Loan signage impact the success of library patrons in using ILL services?
What are key factors in the success of animal-assisted literacy programs offered at public libraries?
How do California public librarians use information gathered from social cataloging sites in their reader’s advisory programs?
How effectively does the Oakland Public Library meet the technology needs of Oakland teens?
What is the level of accuracy in the mapping of interface terminologies from selected fields in electronic health record systems to SNOMED CT?
How do library patrons’ emotions and thought processes affect their choice of mode of reference service, specifically between face-to-face reference service and chat reference service?
What are the nature, size, and accessibility of the University of California and California State campus radio archives?
Does pictogram signage improve patron access to the collection in the elementary school library?
Does allowing food and drink increase the number of people coming to the library?
Do reference librarians yield the same results when given the same research question face-to-face vs. an asynchronous form?
What are attorneys’ perceptions of their law library transitioning to an entirely electronic library?
Do professionally staffed elementary school libraries have an impact on students’ reading achievement?
How does the library staff benefit from a full-time social worker at the SFPL?
What comparisons and contrasts can be drawn between the respective impacts of children’s and teens’ participation in variously structured public library-run summer programs on teen reading and library use habits?
What combination of skills, experience, and academic qualifications are required to get a job as an entry-level special librarian in a hi-tech company?

As always, a wonderful array of research questions seeking to tackle various kinds of important problems in our profession. They each designed a study based on their respective research question, and wrote a research proposal about it. Hopefully some of them will actually carry it out!

(photo from http://www.ksos.kit.edu/img/IDEAS_Design.JPG)

The Research Methods Course – An opportunity to tackle real-world problems

One of the courses I teach regularly is “Research Methods in Library and Information Science”. The section I teach is general-purposed and covers the frequently used research methods in the field of LIS. In the meantime, the course has other sections that focus on special topics, and students are free to choose based on their interest. The specializations include different types of research, such as qualitative research or action research, or different LIS domains, such as research in reference and information services or youth services. Students with different backgrounds and pursuits may choose accordingly to fulfill their needs. For example, students who intend to seek positions as children or young adults’ librarians, may elect the section that introduce them to the theory and methods of planning and evaluating youth services (children and young adults). Those who have an interest in working in archives may elect the section that covers theory and methods of historical research and writing. In addition, the research methods course can be taken twice for two specializations so students can expand their repertoire of research knowledge and skills.

A major assignment in the course is to develop a research proposal, where students need to identify a research problem, formulate a research question, and design a research study to answer the research question. I always position the research methods course as a “problem-solving” course that will equip students with skills/techniques to solve actual problems they encounter at work. And this proposal assignment manifests how the skills/techniques can be put to work in a hypothetical situation. Well, not entirely hypothetical. I encourage students to talk to practitioners and see if they have any problems that could benefit from a research study, and some of them have developed their research proposals based on real problems faced by librarians. For example, after talking to Oakland public librarians, a student is proposing a study to assess Oakland teens’ technology needs and how they are met by the local public library, because this is what the librarians want to find out.

I think the research methods course presents a good opportunity for students to understand the kinds of issues and problems that original research can help tackle. But for now I haven’t done more than encouraging them to talk to practitioners to identify practical problems that they can propose a research study to solve. I’m sure there’s more that I can do, and I just need to figure out what and how. To be continued.

Books about Research Methods (1)

Some LIS practitioners may not get a chance to take the Research Methods course in their degree program, and to help with this issue, Professor Sharon Weiner from Purdue University Libraries created self-directed online professional development program, “Practice into Research, Research into Practice,” to try. The program is openly available at no cost. It consists of a slide orientation; a pre-assessment; a syllabus that details the assignments and activities; and a program assessment.

Sharon’s program is an inspiring idea, and I would like to follow her lead and introduce some books about research methods that I find useful for practitioner researchers. If a librarian doesn’t have formal education or training about research methods (or doesn’t have time for it), reading a book is probably the easiest way to gain the basic knowledge about how to conduct and evaluate research.

The first book I would like to introduce is the textbook I use in my own class “Research Methods in LIS” – The Practice of Social Research, 13^th ed., by Earl Babbie. Babbie wrote this book for all social science students, so it’s not specific to the LIS field. But I like how he explains the concepts, terminology and techniques involved in research. In my class, some students love the book because of its clarity and readability, but some others find it difficult to digest the content without the LIS context. I try to compensate for that by giving students additional readings of LIS research articles so that they can see how the research methods discussed in Babbie’s book are applied by LIS researchers.

Babbie’s book starts with an introduction to what social research is, and then explains the research design process (conceptualizing and operationalizing the variables under study), which I appreciate most because it lays a solid foundation to understanding the following chapters of data collection and analysis methods. The focus of the book is entirely on practical techniques that researchers use to carry out their observations and analysis. It touches little on research paradigms and theories, and I guess that’s why the book is called “The practice of social research”. For practitioners who wish to develop a well-rounded view on social research and recognize the elements of valid and reliable research, this book would be a good place to start.

Getting started

Earlier in March, I was invited to give a presentation at the “Research Day” event organized by Loyola Marymount University Library and Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC). The purpose of this event was to promote practitioner research and cultivate a research culture among academic librarians. The morning session focused on research methods – I gave a talk about qualitative research methods, and two other speakers talked about quantitative methods and data analysis techniques. The afternoon session showcased librarian research via both posters and 20-minute presentations. The topics ranged from reference service assessment, information literacy evaluation, user behavior on library Website, to medical/health information service. Representatives from publishers were also present and delivered a panel on the journal publishing process.

It was a very fruitful day for me, and I got to have many engaging conversations with librarians about their research work. I was particularly excited to see their interests in qualitative research. For example, one librarian was planning a study to analyze comments posted to The Chronicle of the Higher Education, and she was interested in using a qualitative research paradigm to guide her analysis. I’m not a qualitative researcher by training, but over the years of teaching “Research Methods in LIS”, I have grown to appreciate the power of qualitative methods in capturing nuanced attitudes and behavior. I’m glad that the “Research Day” event offered me the opportunity to talk about qualitative research methods to a large audience of librarians.

A full day immersed in enthusiastic exchanges of research ideas left me wonder if there’s anything I can do to support librarians’ research efforts. Blog seems to be a good platform to continuously share with librarians and other LIS practitioners information they might find useful in consuming and conducting research. I named the blog “Formalized Curiosity” after this quote “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose”, by one of my favorite authors, Zora Neale Hurston. I hope this blog will contribute to the enhancement of practitioner research in LIS, as we all know, research-based practice is key to the growth of the profession.