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A.R. Dykes Library Blog

05/13/2025
profile-icon Prasanna Vaduvathiriyan, AHIP

Recently, we are observing an exponential growth in the production of scientific literature. While this has benefited us gaining new knowledge in education and healthcare, it also makes it difficult for us to locate the best information on a topic. When conducting literature searches for finding scientific studies, using National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus is crucial. Searching with MeSH could add value to your literature searching skills and increase precision to the search results.

What is MeSH? 

MeSH are the official vocabulary that describe the subject content of an article in Medline. It branches out from broader to narrower terms that are arranged in a hierarchical order. There could be typically 5-12 vocabularies assigned to articles that are indexed in PubMed (Medline).

Where can you find MeSH?

  • On the Entrez MeSH database; it is also available at the bottom of PubMed homepage that allows to  build searches.
  • Ovid Medline database, Clinical Trials.gov, and Cochrane library
  • Directly from NLM’s  standalone MeSH Browser to find the vocabularies.

What’s new about MeSH?

NLM ensures accuracy of MeSH with annual revisions and updates. In 2025, there are  interesting expansions, additions, and deletions that might help you to improve the research.  Below are some examples

2025 changes to MeSH vocabulary

MeSH Tutorials 

Have a suggestion to improve the subject headings and/or vocabularies? Write to  NLM help desk

Want to discuss and learn more? Connect with one of the research librarians

 

03/21/2025
profile-icon Perry Weidling

The pressure to publish is an all too familiar feeling in academia. But authorship is a complicated subject. Who should be included as an author? What about publication requirements related to authorship? And ethical considerations? 

 

When putting together a manuscript for submission, it’s important to consider who contributed what to the materials in the manuscript. While there are different authorship standards that academic journals refer to, such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) in health sciences, most governing bodies agree that the minimum requirement for authorship is: 

Substantial contributions to the work 

AND 

Accountability for the work that was done and its presentation in publication. 

 

Those individuals who are included as authors should be active contributors to the work and how it is presented for publication. Be sure to check the author guidelines for the journal you are submitting. In some spaces, the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) is used to describe each person’s contributions to the research outputs. CRediT defines fourteen specific types of contributor roles.  

If someone has contributed to the project but has not done enough to be an author, acknowledgment of the work is important. But there are certain types of authorship that should be avoided 

  1.  

  2. Ghost Authorship  

Ghost authorship or the practice of not naming someone as an author nor acknowledging their work who has significantly contributed to the research is wrong. Contributions should be acknowledged appropriately. 

 

  1. Guest Authorship 

It may be tempting to add a “big name” as an author with the hope that including them will increase your chances of getting published. This is referred to as “guest authorship” and is another type of authorship to avoid. 

 

  1. Gift Authorship 

Authorship should also not be bestowed as currency. Naming someone as an author as a favor when that person has not contributed significantly to the research is called “gift authorship” and is another practice to avoid. 

 

If you are interested in learning more about guidance for who should be included as an author and best practices to use when working on scholarly outputs, come join us for the ASCEND webinar on March 26th. We will talk about what it means to be an author, best practices, and ethical issues involved.  

 

Wednesday, March 26, 2025, 11am – 12pm 

Academic authorship status entails both privilege and responsibility on the labor and quality of scholarly work. It is important for developing and established scholars and researchers to understand what it means to be an author, best practices for discussing authorship status with colleagues, and ethical issues involved with authorship status. 

Join A.R. Dykes Research and Learning Librarians Prasanna Vaduvathiriyan and Perry Weidling as they discuss the definitions of authorship, following best practices of assigning authorship, and how to communicate with others about appropriate status and credit on academic publications. 

 

08/07/2024
profile-icon Casey Phillips, MLIS, AHIP

There are many complications and inequities with scholarly publishing. Just as many structures in our society, the systems of scholarly publishing and academic institutions were created and are sustained by what author George Lipsitz (2006) coined as “the possessive investment in whiteness”. 
These structures promote a process that is known to those historically part of the conversation but excludes or makes it much harder for those historically marginalized to participate or to be successful within its structure. This is a lot to cover in one blog post, so I will highlight some of the issues and the attempts to deconstruct these systems. You can read and research more with the resources included at the bottom of this post.

First, research should be quality, and research takes time. At first glance, the peer-reviewed process of research and the methods in conducting research seem justified and are best practices. This would be the case if access to publishing and funding were equitable. However, in an inequitable system, the same populations are continually pursued to be published, are given notice to funding opportunities, are given tenure, and are cited in publications (Crumpton & Coltrain, n.d.). 

Second, as health equity and other DEI efforts have become hotly debated topics, many people outside of the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and LGBTQIA+ communities, do research and publish, even though BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ researchers and scholars were already doing the work. This results in BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ scholars and researchers being overshadowed and pushed away from the work that they have been doing for a long time (Crumpton & Coltrain, n.d.).

These issues can be addressed individually, collectively, and systemically. Students, educators, researchers, and scholars can:
Individually:
     • look to their own implicit bias
     • learn more about the issues described above
     • question who they are citing
     • read and cite others, especially those from the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities
     • seek guidance and collaboration from BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities before starting research

Collectively:
     • Join movements like DORA | DORA (sfdora.org) and Cite Black Women
     • Have difficult conversations together
     • Promote voices from BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities

Systematically:
     • Hold institutions accountable for inequitable practices in research and publishing
     • Create policies that center BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ researchers and scholars

We all have a hand in direct action that does the deep justice work of systematic change that promotes and supports the research, expertise, and experiences of those historically marginalized and silenced.

For further research and development:
     • Addressing Implicit Bias and Inequity Training
     • Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Toolkit 
     • KUMC’s DEI Turning the Page Book Club 
     • A seat for all: Advancing racial equity in scholarly publishing of health policy and health services research 
     • Recording on the article above: A seat for all
     • 20220909_Sensitive Search Terms in Systematic Searches.docx (live.com)
     • Black in Neuro
     • Black in Immuno
     • #BLACKandSTEM

References

Crumpton, B. & Coltrain, M. (n.d.). Promoting citational justice in health sciences. MLA. Retrieved August 2, 2024, from https://www.mlanet.org/article/promoting-citational-justice-in-health-sciences/.

Lipsitz, G. (2006). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Temple University Press.

As cited in Crumpton & Coltrain:

1. Smith CA, Garrett-Scott D. “We are not named”: Black women and the politics of citation in anthropology. Feminist Anthropology. 2021 May; 2(1): 18-37. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12038.

2. Lett E, Adekunle D, McMurray P, Asaboar EN, Irie W, Simon MA, Hardeman R, McLemore MR. Health equity tourism: Ravaging the justice landscape. J Med Syst. 2022; 46(17), 1-6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-022-01803-5.

3. Pirtle W. Black women and health equity: Spotlight on black maternal health and COVID-19 with Dr. Monica McLemore (S2E5) [audio podcast]. In Cite Black Women; 4 May 2020. https://soundcloud.com/user-211649525/s2e5-black-women-and-health-equity-spotlight-on-black-maternal-health-and-covid-19.

4. Bauer GR, Hammond R, Travers R, Kaay M, Hohenadel K M, Boyce M (2009). "I don't think this is theoretical; this is our lives": how erasure impacts health care for transgender people. The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care: JANAC. 2009; 20(5), 348–361. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jana.2009.07.004.

5. Faiz J, Essien U R, Washington DL, Ly DP. Racial and Ethnic Differences in Barriers Faced by Medical College Admission Test Examinees and Their Association with Medical School Application and Matriculation. JAMA health forum. 2023; 4(4), e230498. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2023.0498.

6. McFarling UL. ‘Health equity tourists’: How white scholars are colonizing research on health disparities. 23 Sept 2021. In: STAT [Internet]. Available from: https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/23/health-equity-tourists-white-scholars-colonizing-health-disparities-research/.

7. Saha S, Beach MC. Impact of Physician Race on Patient Decision-Making and Ratings of Physicians: a Randomized Experiment Using Video Vignettes. Journal of general internal medicine. 2020; 35(4), 1084–1091. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-020-05646-z.

8. Else H, Perkel JM. The giant plan to track diversity in research journals [Internet]. In: Nature. Springer Nature Limited; 23 Feb 2022. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00426-7.

07/08/2024
profile-icon Kristin Sederstrom
In this post we’ll cover how you can publish open under our agreement with Elsevier, review statistics for the last 18 months, and take a brief look at what the future may hold with Read & Publish deals.
06/24/2024
profile-icon Nate Poell
It's time to reflect on a recent copyright conference and discuss a couple related topics and their relevance to us at KUMC.

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