Sara Scheib

This collection is intended as a one-stop shop for resources related to the thesis writing process. Topics are presented in a roughly chronological order, beginning with steps you may need to take before you collect data. They continue with resources related to copyright, the intersection of copyright and the arts, accessibility considerations, and file preparation. All are intended to equip you with the information you need to make writing your thesis as straightforward as possible.

Anesthesiology journals appear to have been progressively publishing a smaller percentage of operating room (OR) management studies. Similarly, non-anesthesiologists have increasingly been authors of these publications. Five hypotheses were formulated to evaluate these impressions based on 2 of the authors' curation of an online, comprehensive bibliography of OR management articles and corresponding referenced course materials.
We studied all 2938 publications having Scopus' SciVal topic T.6319 (OR management) more than 28 years from 1996 through May 2023, including 8608 distinct authors.
Half (50%) of the publications were absent from PubMed, and the percentage absent has been increasing progressively (Kendall's τ = 0.71; P < .0001). Fewer than half were published in journals including anesthesiology as the sole classification (20%) or as one of the classifications (27%). The anesthesiology journals have been publishing a progressively decreasing fraction (τ = -0.61; P < .0001). Among the 11 authors each contributing at least 1% of the OR management science publications, 9 were anesthesiologists and the other 2 had anesthesiologists as coauthors on all these publications. Only 3% of authors had at least 10 OR management publications from earlier years. There were 75% of authors with no such earlier publications and 85% with 0 or 1. There was a progressive increase in the number of authors publishing OR management annually and with at most 1 such earlier publication (τ = 0.90; P < .0001). Only 20% of publications had any author with at least 10 earlier OR management publications, 48% had every author with no such earlier publications, and 60% had all authors with 0 or 1.
Although most of the authors with the greatest production of OR management science were anesthesiologists, the percentage of publications in anesthesiology journals has been decreasing progressively. Anesthesiologists cannot rely solely on anesthesiology journals to keep up with the field. For most publications, every author had few or no earlier publications on the topic. Clinicians and managers relying on OR management science will continue to need to apply more information when judging whether published results can reliably be applied to their facilities.

As Digital Measures is no longer used by the University of Iowa, the College of Engineering approached the Engineering Library to identify a new system to showcase their faculty work. The Engineering Library identified Esploro, a research information management system powered by Ex Libris, because there are several advantages: (1) we have full control of metadata; (2) publication records are indexed and searchable in our library catalog system; (3) publication records are discoverable by search engines; (4) Smart Harvest, an automated content harvesting feature, can load publication records from a variety of sources; (5) a complete list of publications can be easily generated for grant applications and reviews. Since the College of Engineering is the first college to adopt Esploro, there is no standard workflow for us to follow. We developed a workflow by trial and error: (1) making an initial estimate of the volume of the publication records for 110 faculty; (2) turning on the Smart Harvest to load records; (3) reviewing whether the potential records are matched to the correct people, noting especially document types and DOIs, which can indicate higher quality records from the Ex Libris database, and manually approving or rejecting the records in Esploro; (4) identifying and collecting records in Scopus to expand the Ex Libris database; (5) activating Smart Harvest again to add additional records that were missed; (6) running various reports about quality of records and improving records as needed. Facing the major challenges including the large volume of records, DOIs not existing in
journal articles published in early years, and DOIs not existing in some conference proceedings and book chapters, we shared some best practices and lessons learned. Since Esploro continues to be enhanced, we will refine our workflow with new functionality as it is added.

Continued growth in open-access (OA) resources has left us all struggling to understand and communicate their impact—a challenge that we need to solve in order to justify the funding needed to sustain momentum. Understanding impact is complicated by the lack of standards; we’re all experimenting with various approaches but which one(s) should we adopt? Communicating impact is complicated by the diverse range of stakeholders involved in OA. This session brings together three diverse perspectives to explore the issues, raise questions and help us all start to make sense of this space.

One of the challenges facing our industry is building on standards like COUNTER to support the much more diverse range of use cases and stakeholders wanting to understand the impact of OA publishing. Traditional reporting focuses on how resources are used, but for many funders it’s also critical to understand which audiences are engaging with content and how those align to funding priorities—a particular challenge as usage patterns shift off-campus and privacy becomes ever more important online.

As more publishers transition their publishing models to support OA, we are seeing usage soar. While an increase in global usage is something to celebrate, increases in unauthenticated use, new patterns around who and where content is accessed from, and how patrons are engaging are emerging. How do publishers demonstrate these changes and understand the impact to libraries, authors, funders, and new kinds of users? How do libraries communicate the value of OA resources to our scholars, administrators, and communities? In this paper, we will look at OA challenges and opportunities from different perspectives. What are libraries doing to embrace changes in publishing, what are publishers doing to support them, and what can data providers do to bring the needs of each together? 

As sociologists Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar noted several decades ago, science is a literary enterprise, in which the unit of credit is the paper, and research communities collaborate and recognize each others' work internationally via journal-published papers. Papers, in turn, are parlayed into research grants, which sustain laboratories, graduate education, and research careers. But although careers in STEM require sophisticated reading and writing skills, STEM students generally begin graduate school with little writing training beyond rudimentary lab-report writing and one or two undergraduate courses in rhetoric and composition. Their advisors are scientists who may or may not have the time or aptitude for teaching writing well, and the general mode of learning is sink-or-swim. Students are expected to write comprehensive-exam essays, papers, applications, and theses, and this is often a source of frustration and anxiety for both students and faculty.

At the University of Iowa, a science librarian and a science-writing professor, both located in the Department of Chemistry, joined forces in the summer of 2015 to work with chemistry research groups on reading and writing projects. The groups have since met weekly, for no credit, informally but committedly. Under a gentle but continuous push for students to offer drafts for critique and discussion, students have produced successful theses, papers, and fellowship applications. Along the way, there have been ample opportunities to incorporate concepts from the Framework for Information Literacy. Discussion topics have included the business of scientific publishing, the purpose of scientific papers and their structure, the construction of authority in scientific communities, the critical reading and evaluation of scholarly and popular works, the influence of Congress on funding agencies, and communication of one's science to a broad range of audiences in various media. Key to the groups' work is the fact that neither facilitator is an expert in the research groups’ subfields, which requires students to discuss their work in clear language and broad outline.

We have so far run five Reading-Writing Groups ranging in focus from radiochemistry to chemical-education research. While they are often highly praised as helpful to students and faculty, we do not regard them as an unmixed success. This chapter outlines the structure of a successful RWG for STEM grad students, including our observations on best practices and potential obstacles, with suggestions for founding such groups in STEM departments.

The University of Iowa Libraries, like many other academic libraries, is dedicated to the development of research data services. From 2012 to 2014, we ran an environmental scan on campus data management resources that assessed research data needs and identified gaps in existing research data services. Based on the outcomes of the environmental scan and assessment, we formed a working group to create a guide for researchers and campus service providers on data management resources in August 2014. To explore good practices in research data services and establish a long-term partnership with researchers, faculty, and students, two subject specialist librarians from the group started a case study for organizing and documenting research data.

In consideration of the researcher’s specific data generation, collection, and analysis methods, we developed a data organization scheme based on the ISA-Tab metadata standard and applied it as the data was migrated to secure storage. As a result, the organized data is not only more accessible to the researcher, her students, and collaborators but also easily understood by newcomers to their laboratory.