Abstract
Background: Concerns over scientific reproducibility have grown in recent years, leading the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require researchers to address these issues in research grant applications. Starting in 2020, training grants were required to provide a plan for educating trainees in rigor and reproducibility. Academic medical centers have responded with different solutions to fill this educational need. As experienced instructors with expertise in topics relating to reproducibility, librarians can play a prominent role in providing trainings, classes, and events to educate investigators and trainees, and bolstering reproducibility in their communities. Case Presentations: This special report summarizes efforts at five institutions to provide education in reproducibility to biomedical and life sciences researchers. Our goal is to expand awareness of the range of approaches in providing reproducibility services in libraries. Conclusions: Reproducibility education by medical librarians can take many forms. These specific programs in reproducibility education build upon libraries’ existing collaborations, with funder mandates providing a major impetus. Collaborator needs shaped the exact type of educational or other reproducibility support and combined with each library’s strengths to yield a diversity of offerings based on capacity and interest. As demand for and complexity of reproducibility education increases due to new institutional and funder mandates, reproducibility education will merit special attention.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 281-293 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Journal of the Medical Library Association |
| Volume | 110 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Thank you to Melissa Rethlefsen, MSLS, executive director of University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center, who offered guidance and suggested collaborators on this paper and without whose help and work in the field of reproducibility this paper would not have been possible. Thank you to Mellanye Lackey, Donna Baluchi, Heidi Greenberg, Shirley Zhao, and Darell Schmick for their work on Research Reproducibility 2016 (SZ, ML, DS), Research Reproducibility 2018 (ML, DB, HG, SZ), and Grand Rounds Research Reproducibility (ML, DB, HG) while at the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library. We also acknowledge the Research Reproducibility 2020 planning team, including Katie MacWilkinson, Hannah Norton, Sarah Meyer, Plato Smith, Dan Maxwell, and the external advisory board members at the University of Florida. We thank Michelle Leonard for organizing the 2020 UF Research Summer Seminar Series in Research Integrity and Responsible Conduct of Research and providing the evaluation data. This study on Research Reproducibility 2020 was approved by the University of Florida Institutional Review Board (IRB202000619).
Funding Information:
Research Reproducibility 2018: Building Research Integrity through Reproducibility was supported by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Research Integrity (ORIIRI70034-01-00); the Vice President for Research Office, University of Utah; the Center for Clinical and Translational Science, University of Utah (UL1TR001067); and the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library.
Funding Information:
NIH T32 Supplemental Grant; Internal funding sources
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, Medical Library Association. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- NIH requirements
- education
- library instruction
- replicability
- reproducibility
- rigor and reproducibility
