Thesis for doctoral degree (Ph.D.) 2008 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The information sources and information-seeking behaviors in the field of injury prevention and safety promotion David W. Lawrence back cover The autor, subject, and title cards held in racks of small drawers provided an index of all documents in a library. Yale University Sterling Memorial Library card catalog. Photo by Henry M. Trotter, 2005. Provided by Wikimedia Commons. Developed by Charles Ammi Cutter (1837-1903), the card catalog was a familiar sight to library users for generations. For most libraries, the card catalog has been effectively replaced by computer-based online systems. The subject catalogue ("Schlagwortkatalog") of the University Library of Graz. Photo by Marcus Gossler 2005. Provided by Wickimedia Commons. Charles Cutter was among the first to state the objectives of a bibliographic system in his Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalog, 1876. According to Cutter, those objectives were: 1. to enable a person to find a book of which either (Identifying objective) the author,the title or the subject is known. 2. to show what the library has (Collocating objective) by a given author, on a given subject, or in a given kind of literature 3. to assist in the choice of a book (Evaluating objective) as to its edition (bibliographically) or as to its character (literary or topical) Cover photo: Card catalog in the United Nations Hamersjold Library. Photo by Miapham, 2008. Provided by Wickimedia Commons. Division of International Health, Department of Public Health Sciences Karolinska Institutet, SE-171 76 Stockholm, Sweden THE INFORMATION-SEEKING BEHAVIORS OF PROFESSIONALS AND INFORMATION SOURCES IN THE FIELD OF INJURY PREVENTION AND SAFETY PROMOTION David W. Lawrence Stockholm 2008 The Information Seeking Behaviors of Professionals and Information Sources in the Field of Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion Copyright © David W. Lawrence, 2008 ISBN 978-91-7409-164-9 Published by Karolinska Institutet. Printed by Universitesservice US-AB, 2008 Lawrence DW. The information-seeking behaviors of professionals & information sources in the field of IPSP Errata: Page 1, paragraph 2, lines 5 & 6 The sentence should read: "Upon combining the results from the six studies..." Page 9, line 10: "authors scholarly work" should be "authors' scholarly work" Page 13, final paragraph, 3rd and 4th sentences should read: "Those who depend on appearances could miss important information. The indexes to early volumes of the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) included accidents and poisoning among the categories." Page 14 - Database History: Line 2: The word documents should be documents' (with an apostrophe) Line 10: The correct spelling of the author's name is Taube Page 15, line 4 Missing space between words: potentiallyrelevant should read potentially relevant Page 19 - Colleagues and other experts: Line 7 after the conjunction but the word may should be inserted: "but may also assist with" Page 21: The first full sentence should read: "The non-relevant items, or false drops, are created when items are retrieved which meet the syntactic requirements of a query but not the semantic requirements." The sentence should be within quotation marks. Page 24, Subject Descriptor Searching, paragraph 2, line 7 Missing space between words: limitedwithin should read limited within ... Page 27 - Broader Term: The second sentence should read: "In linguistics the term with this relationship to other words is known as a hypernym -- words whose meaning are general instances of more specific words." Page 28, line 7, first word The words a new topic should be substituted for the word it. Page 30, Citation errors..., line 9: The sentence should read: "However, this same article was cited in an article in the journal Health Education Research with the title, "The Guidelines for Systematic Reviews of Health Promotion and Public Health Interventions Taskforce. The Challenges of Systematically Reviewing Public Health Interventions" Page 33, paragraph 3, lines 8 & 9 The words annals, bulletin, journal, proceedings, etc should be enclosed within curved-brackets Page 35, Informational Literacy, paragraph 4, line 4 The word this should instead be the word instruction. Page 43 The second paragraph of the long quotation should not be repeated. Page 45 In the paragraph beginning with "Sandstrom continues...": The words the time should not be repeated. Page 56 - Ulrich's and WorldCat compared The first line should read: "Each of the two systems contains information about journals that are not included in..." Page 57, Method, line 8 A straight bracket "[" should be inserted before the word For. Page 59, Method, Paragraph 2 The final sentence of the paragraph should instead be the first sentence of the paragraph. Page 65, Important concepts..., line 7 The word then should instead be the word the. Page 69: The third line from the end of the page should read: "...articles that were missed by a 'pure' MeSH search..." Page 73, final paragraph Line 6 should not be empty space. Line 7 should immediately follow what is printed as line 5. Page 77 Thorpe misspelled Poul Anderson's name when quoting him. The spelling of Anderson's name in the thesis is correct. Page 79 The first word of line 13, to, should be deleted. ABSTRACT Injuries are a serious public health problem worldwide. Despite the ubiquity of the World Wide Web and the resources of many different literature databases, the search for information concerning Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion (IPSP) topics is still complicated by several major barriers. IPSP is a multi-disciplinary field, making use of literature from at least 30 widely disparate professions. Each profession uses technical language that may not be fully understood by those in other fields. Each publishes in different journals, and those journals may be indexed in different databases. This thesis draws information from database users and database searches in this multidisciplinary field in an effort clarify the strengths and weaknesses of 1) the searchers query techniques and 2) the content and search systems of their data resources.. Six studies each provide a perspective on the issues involved in finding useful material within the body of scientific knowledge relevant to IPSP. With each of the different perspectives on the information-seeking process, there are gaps in knowledge about the seekers, the bibliographic information resources, and how to access the needed items within the databases. The first study uses three sources to identify the concepts that are important to the field of IPSP and the terms that label them. An inventory of concepts and terms was gathered from: 1) dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri; 2) the contents of selected scholarly journals; and 3) the search terms used to query a database of IPSP literature. An abundance of concepts and terms were identified – at least 3500 concepts labeled with almost 11,000 terms. Three studies (Studies IV, V, and VI) examined the information sources from which IPSP-relevant knowledge may be obtained. Study IV inventoried the scholarly journals that publish IPSP articles and the databases that index them. Study V assessed the usefulness of the controlled search vocabularies of two popular databases (MEDLINE and PsycINFO) for finding articles on key IPSP topics. Study VI examined the contents of four databases to evaluate the breadth of literature available from a single database. There are 597 scholarly journals that publish four or more IPSP relevant articles per year but no literature database includes the contents of all years of all of the 597 journals. The search vocabularies of MEDLINE and PsycINFO are of limited help to finding all articles contained in the databases on five key IPSP topics. When the EMBASE, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and Web of Science databases are thoroughly searched for articles on five IPSP topics, it was found that the proportion of articles common to all databases was low (5.6% to 16.7%). Studies II and III looked at the knowledge, skills, and practices of IPSP information- seekers. Study II examined the SafetyLit website logs and found that searchers only use one or two textword terms to search the SafetyLit archive and that, by not using more terms, they miss much of what the database contains on their topic. Study III surveyed subscribers to the weekly SafetyLit Literature Update Bulletin and found that non- librarian searchers rarely used more than one database and that the most-used database was MEDLINE. The non-librarian searchers seldom used query aids and strategies that could improve their results. They had little or no training in searching the databases they used but reported that they were quite satisfied with the results of their searches. In conclusion, IPSP literature is scattered across multiple established databases, limiting the effectiveness of simple searches using one or two terms and only one database. Unfortunately, surveys showed that these simple searches are the rule in IPSP, suggesting that many projects may be suffering from a lack of complete data on which to base their actions and conclusions. LIST OF PUBLICATIONS I. Lawrence, DW, Guard, A, Meier, A, Laflamme, L. Developing the injury prevention and safety promotion thesaurus, international English edition: An interdisciplinary tool for indexing and searching for research literature. Progress report 1. Safety Science 2006; 44(4): 279-296. II. Lawrence, DW (2007). Using online databases to find peer-reviewed journal articles on injury prevention and safety promotion research: A study of textword queries by SafetyLit users. Injury Prevention 2007; 13(4): 232-236. III. Lawrence DW, Laflamme L. Using online databases to find articles on injury prevention and safety promotion topics: How do SafetyLit subscribers use other databases? Safety Science 2008; (accepted, doi: 10.1016/j.ssci.2008.01.004). IV. Lawrence DW, Laflamme L. Using online databases to find journal articles on injury prevention and safety promotion research: Key journals and the databases that index them.