Announcing the Health Information Professionals (HIP) Journal Club!

A journal club is an organization of professionals who agree to meet periodically to discuss literature related to their profession. Journal clubs have become a popular way for health care practitioners to stay up-to-date on the literature in their field. Scholars often use these clubs to hone their critical appraisal skills and improve knowledge within their practice.

When Alyssa Migdalski, a colleague at another university, contacted me about co-convening our own club, I admit I had limited familiarity with the idea. That said, I was excited by the prospect! Evidence-based practice has become popular among librarians, just as evidence-based medicine has become essential to health care. In both fields, practitioners make decisions about the provision of services based on what the evidence recommends. I eagerly agreed to co-convene this group, and thus the HIP Journal Club was born!

When it comes to keeping up with the research in the library profession, I often find myself printing out articles, wanting to read them and keep up with the ideas other librarians are sharing. However, I struggle to make time to actually sit down and read them. It helps me to carve out time when I know that I have a group of people relying on me to contribute to the discussion. My peers at other universities help me to think about concepts in a different way, from a new perspective; this leads to ideas that I can implement locally, here at UTA.

Our journal club meets bi-monthly via Zoom, beginning on October 8^th at 2:00 pm, Central Daylight Time. We plan to select 1-2 articles per session to discuss; at least one of the articles selected must be openly licensed so that no one is hindered from participating based on a lack of institutional access. We would love to have others join us; if you are a health information professional or a student interested in pursuing a career in health science librarianship, please register on our website.

For our first meeting we will discuss a study that developed critical appraisal checklists for Library and Information Science (LIS) literature (citation below). This article will inform our appraisal of future articles discussed by the group. 

Booth, A., & Brice, A. (2003). Clear-cut?: Facilitating health librarians to use information research in practice. Health Info Libr J, 20 Suppl 1, 45-52. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2532.20.s1.10.x

If you have any questions, please contact Alyssa or me!