Introduction

This issue of Library Trends, on the theme of Research Into Practice, has been designed with two aims in mind. Published in 2013, it marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Information School (iSchool) at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom by presenting a selection of papers that demonstrate the creativity and variety of research undertaken in the field of librarianship and share a unifying concern to make links, as well as establish meaningful connections, between research and practice. The issue is dedicated to Bob Usherwood, now an emeritus professor in the school, whose work and legacy at Sheffield are distinguished by an exemplary commitment to putting research into practice, and it is especially pleasing for us to be able offer this tribute to Bob in the year when he is due to celebrate his seventieth birthday. We also believe that an issue on this theme is timely and important for our profession. There has been a strong drive lately to promote evidence-based practice in library and information work and to develop a research culture in the practitioner community, exemplified in the United Kingdom by the DREaM project, amid continuing concerns about the disconnect between the research and practitioner communities

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Evidence based healthcare planning in developing countries: An Informatics perspective

Most of the national Health Information Systems (HIS) in resource limited developing countries do not serve the purpose of management support and thus the service is adversely affected. While emphasising the importance of timely and accurate health information in decision making in healthcare planning, this paper explains that Health Management Information System Failure is commonly seen in developing countries as well as the developed countries. It is suggested that the possibility of applying principles of Health Informatics and the technology of Decision Support Systems should be seriously considered to improve the situation. A brief scientific explanation of the evolution of these two disciplines is included

Comparing research investment to United Kingdom institutions and published outputs for tuberculosis, HIV and malaria: A systematic analysis across 1997-2013

Background: The "Unfinished Agenda" of infectious diseases is of great importance to policymakers and research funding agencies that require ongoing research evidence on their effective management. Journal publications help effectively share and disseminate research results to inform policy and practice. We assess research investments to United Kingdom institutions in HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, and analyse these by numbers of publications and citations and by disease and type of science. Methods: Information on infection-related research investments awarded to United Kingdom institutions across 1997-2010 were sourced from funding agencies and individually categorised by disease and type of science. Publications were sourced from the Scopus database via keyword searches and filtered to include only publications relating to human disease and containing a United Kingdom-based first and/or last author. Data were matched by disease and type of science categories. Investment (United Kingdom pounds) and publications were compared to generate an 'investment per publication' metric; similarly, an 'investment per citation' metric was also developed as a measure of the usefulness of research. Results: Total research investment for all three diseases was £1.4 billion, and was greatest for HIV (£651.4 million), followed by malaria (£518.7 million) and tuberculosis (£239.1 million). There were 17,271 included publications, with 9,322 for HIV, 4,451 for malaria, and 3,498 for tuberculosis. HIV publications received the most citations (254,949), followed by malaria (148,559) and tuberculosis (100,244). According to UK pound per publication, tuberculosis (£50,691) appeared the most productive for investment, compared to HIV (£61,971) and malaria (£94,483). By type of science, public health research was most productive for HIV (£27,296) and tuberculosis (£22,273), while phase I-III trials were most productive for malaria (£60,491). According to UK pound per citation, tuberculosis (£1,797) was the most productive area for investment, compared to HIV (£2,265) and malaria (£2,834). Public health research was the most productive type of science for HIV (£2,265) and tuberculosis (£1,797), whereas phase I-III trials were most productive for malaria (£1,713). Conclusions: When comparing total publications and citations with research investment to United Kingdom institutions, tuberculosis research appears to perform best in terms of efficiency. There were more public health-related publications and citations for HIV and tuberculosis than other types of science. These findings demonstrate the diversity of research funding and outputs, and provide new evidence to inform research investment strategies for policymakers, funders, academic institutions, and healthcare organizations.Infectious Disease Research Networ

Exploring the relationship between the Engineering and Physical Sciences and the Health and Life Sciences by advanced bibliometric methods

We investigate the extent to which advances in the health and life sciences (HLS) are dependent on research in the engineering and physical sciences (EPS), particularly physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. The analysis combines two different bibliometric approaches. The first approach to analyze the 'EPS-HLS interface' is based on term map visualizations of HLS research fields. We consider 16 clinical fields and five life science fields. On the basis of expert judgment, EPS research in these fields is studied by identifying EPS-related terms in the term maps. In the second approach, a large-scale citation-based network analysis is applied to publications from all fields of science. We work with about 22,000 clusters of publications, each representing a topic in the scientific literature. Citation relations are used to identify topics at the EPS-HLS interface. The two approaches complement each other. The advantages of working with textual data compensate for the limitations of working with citation relations and the other way around. An important advantage of working with textual data is in the in-depth qualitative insights it provides. Working with citation relations, on the other hand, yields many relevant quantitative statistics. We find that EPS research contributes to HLS developments mainly in the following five ways: new materials and their properties; chemical methods for analysis and molecular synthesis; imaging of parts of the body as well as of biomaterial surfaces; medical engineering mainly related to imaging, radiation therapy, signal processing technology, and other medical instrumentation; mathematical and statistical methods for data analysis. In our analysis, about 10% of all EPS and HLS publications are classified as being at the EPS-HLS interface. This percentage has remained more or less constant during the past decade

Can the US Minimum Data Set Be Used for Predicting Admissions to Acute Care Facilities?

This paper is intended to give an overview of Knowledge Discovery in Large Datasets (KDD) and data mining applications in healthcare particularly as related to the Minimum Data Set, a resident assessment tool which is used in US long-term care facilities. The US Health Care Finance Administration, which mandates the use of this tool, has accumulated massive warehouses of MDS data. The pressure in healthcare to increase efficiency and effectiveness while improving patient outcomes requires that we find new ways to harness these vast resources. The intent of this preliminary study design paper is to discuss the development of an approach which utilizes the MDS, in conjunction with KDD and classification algorithms, in an attempt to predict admission from a long-term care facility to an acute care facility. The use of acute care services by long term care residents is a negative outcome, potentially avoidable, and expensive. The value of the MDS warehouse can be realized by the use of the stored data in ways that can improve patient outcomes and avoid the use of expensive acute care services. This study, when completed, will test whether the MDS warehouse can be used to describe patient outcomes and possibly be of predictive value