The Pediatric Breathing Survey

To ensure culturally-sensitive assessments, the researcher designed a Pediatric Breathing Survey (PBS) to measure quality of life for African-American children. The purpose of this study was to test whether the PBS is a reliable and valid instrument. Comparisons of group differences on race, income and parent\u27s level of education based on parent responses to the questionnaires were conducted. More specifically, differences in Health Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) between Caucasian and African-American children were examined. The researcher-designed instrument was compared to Juniper\u27s Pediatric Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire. The sample consisted of parents of 84 school-aged children diagnosed with asthma. It was hypothesized that the PBS would consist of four dimensions of HRQOL: the physical and disease dimension, the psychological dimension, social dimension and the traditional health belief dimension. The traditional health belief domain was added to the PBS and consisted of 11 questions relevant to African-American cultural beliefs and traditions. A factor analysis of the PBS in this sample supported only two domains, the emotional and physical dimensions. Juniper\u27s PAQOLQ was designed to address three domains (physical, emotional and social impairments); the factor analysis for this study supported only one dimension. Both questionnaires (PBS and Juniper\u27s Pediatric Asthma Quality of Life) were reliable and valid. MANOVA and ANOVA analyses were done to determine group differences on the variables of income, race and educational level. This analysis revealed only the factor of income differed between the two instruments. There was no significant statistical difference found for educational level or race. A chi-square analysis was also done on the traditional health belief domain. The chi square analysis revealed a significant difference based on parent\u27s educational level, race and income for the traditional health belief domain question, “I have the money for all my medicine for asthma.” The difference in the two HRQOL instruments is the addition of the traditional health belief domain. This domain reveals a holistic picture of the asthmatic child\u27s living arrangement. The total environment of the subject must be taken into account to adequately assess HRQOL (Burke et al, 1997). The addition of the traditional health belief domain enhances further asthma intervention programs because the patient\u27s total environment is taken into account. The PBS may be a better HRQOL questionnaire for use in the United States. The questionnaire includes questions pertinent to the financial status and living arrangements of the asthmatic child\u27s parents

Make an Impact! Assessing Scholarly Research and Output while Connecting to your Faculty

This session will explain how to calculate impact factors and other citation metrics for your research and for the work of your faculty. It will also teach you how to frame these discussions and how to use these output measures to make connections with faculty, department chairs, and Deans

Altmetrics for the Information Professional: A Primer

Altmetrics, or alternative citation metrics, provide researchers and scholars with new ways to track influence across a wide range of media and platforms. From deciding what to read based on tweets, to enhancing scholarship with collaboration, altmetrics will exert more and more influence on the scholarly landscape. Awareness of altmetric tools, and the ways in which they can be used, will position information professionals at the forefront of this exciting new era in knowledge dissemination and assessment. As social media plays an ever increasing role in the communication of scholarship, the authors will discuss how altmetrics can be a valuable addition to the information professional’s tool kit. Beginning with a review of simple readership tools, and continuing with an overview of complex aggregator programs, the most promising and/or mature products will be described. Some of the many uses of altmetric data will be discussed, including the advantages of participating in large, diverse interest groups, informal reviews of formal documents, and the rapid (and arguably more complete) measure of research impact. The authors will further demonstrate how to use altmetrics to complement and enhance existing methods to provide readership advisory services for ourselves and our patrons, facilitate knowledge sharing, indicate effectiveness, and supply evidence for promotion and tenure

Embedding Librarians into the STEM Publication Process

STEM Librarians at Syracuse University actively participate throughout the scientific publication process. This chapter will outline points in the process where librarian involvement is applicable and beneficial. Librarians Anne Rauh and Linda Galloway will explain how and why it is important to teach tools that organize scientific literature to faculty and students before they begin the writing process. The use of assessment techniques to help inform targeted publication venues will be described. Post-publication, this chapter will describe how to help authors gauge the impact of their work, promote their publications and increase their visibility

Zotero

Zotero is a free, open access, citation management tool that allows users to store, manage and cite bibliographic references. Zotero can format citations in many different styles and lets users insert citations within word processing software. Zotero allows for easy collaboration between multiple authors and enables users to create private or shared reading lists. Zotero is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. At the completion of this class, participants will be able to: Install Zotero Collect and organize citations Create formatted bibliographies and insert citations into documents Collaborate with colleagues to create reading lists and/or jointly author paper

Social Media and Citation Metrics

Quantifying scholarly output via traditional citation metrics is the time-honored method to gauge academic success. However, as the tentacles of social media spread into professional personas, scholars are interacting more frequently and more meaningfully with these tools. Measuring the influence and impact of scholarly engagement with online tools and networks is gaining importance in academia today. Assessing the impact of a scholar’s work can be measured by evaluating several factors including the number of peer-reviewed publications, citations to these publications and the influence of the publications. These metrics take a relatively long time to accumulate, some are available only via subscription resources, and often measure influence only on a specific scientific community. While these accepted tools provide a means to weigh scholarly output, they do not tell the entire story. Increasingly, scholars are engaging with social media in a professional capacity. From following tweets of fellow conference attendees to hearing about newly published papers, researchers are becoming more reliant upon crowdsourced peer review. As the acceptance of social media and online tools has progressed, interest in employing these tools to gauge academic success has been amplified. There is some very interesting work being done on alternative scholarly metrics, or altmetrics (Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, & Neylon, Cameron, 2010). Some of the more mature tools will be discussed, along with current research that connects social networks with citation metrics (Eysenbach, 2011). In addition, acceptance of these tools in scientific disciplines will be addressed, along with the methods that information professionals can use to help facilitate their use