Promoting the Work of Librarians through the Academic Pediatric Association Educational Scholars Program

Background: The Academic Pediatric Association Educational Scholars Program is a 3-year national faculty development program for pediatricians. This program is designed to aid junior faculty early in their academic careers, with each scholar creating and completing a scholarly project to build their skills and a niche in educational scholarship and leadership. In 2014, a medical librarian and two pediatric educators collaborated to conceive, create and design a new module centering on the topic of literature searching. The module provides the junior faculty scholars with fundamental skills to conduct their projects.

Description: As an entrée into understanding the place of a project in the literature, the module authors created a new rubric to evaluate the quality of a manuscript’s introduction, background, and reference sections. The authors created and narrated nine narrated videos, including: 1) Turning Your Research Question/Project into Concepts, 2) Controlled Vocabulary, 3) Keyword Searching (MESH), 4) Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria, 5) Medical Education Databases and 6) Getting to the Full Text. After viewing the videos and completing a consultation worksheet, participants scheduled a meeting with their local medical librarian for further help with the development of their project. Next, participants viewed three videos focused on understanding the impact of their scholarly work (Impact Factors, H-Index and Citation Counts, Altmetrics, and Educational scholarship and promotion). Finally, scholars performed a guided reflective critique of their scholarship moving forward.

Conclusion: Currently, three cohorts of junior faculty scholars have completed the course. The rubric aided participants to be objective when evaluating papers and provides a tool for use in future manuscript evaluations. While the videos provided context and content, the scholars repeatedly mentioned the most valuable part of this module being the actual meeting with their local medical librarian. The librarian taught the junior faculty about specific databases and nuances of searching, making writing an introduction more manageable. Several participants now consider their librarians as part of “their team” and are working for future collaborations in publishing together.