This collection includes recent scholarship by the faculty at Kent State University Libraries.
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Reimagining policy visibility: Bibliometric analysis of core nursing journals
03/2025Background: Providing nurses with knowledge about policy enhances their involvement in policymaking. Policy inclusion in editorial guidelines has yet to be examined.
Purpose: Describe how peer-reviewed nurse journals’ editorial information communicates policy expectations to readers and authors and then to describe policy in articles published in those journals.
Methods: Using a list of nursing journals indexed in CINAHL, we analyzed each journal’s author guidelines and key attributes. Journals that addressed policy guidelines were examined for articles that denoted policy as the subject focus, and the research team descriptively analyzed those articles.
Findings: Only half the journals included policy as a focus (aim, scope, or description), author guidelines, or column. Within this subset of journals, only 267 articles published in 2022 out of 4,805 (5.6%) had policy as a subject focus.
Discussion: Consistently and regularly addressing policy in nursing journals may facilitate nurse authors’ dissemination and reader awareness about policy.
Music Faculty after Pandemic Closures: A Mixed Methods Study of Evolving Resource Preferences and Libraries
03/2025The dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education and the growth in popularity of commercial services such as YouTube warrant an examination of how music faculty have and have not changed their teaching practices and what role the library has played in their pedagogy. Building on a 2017 publication, this mixed methods, multiinstitutional study examined the practices of instructors at three universities to determine what materials they used to support their teaching, their preferred sources and formats of learning content, the library's role in meeting these needs, obstacles in using library resources, and the ways in which the pandemic changed their approach to using resources. Results indicated that faculty preferred for their library to invest in electronic collections over physical materials, they favored obtaining some types of materials from non-library sources, and their use of most library services had rebounded from the declines observed during institutional closures.
Identifying Research Trends, Active Research Areas and Pivotal Publications with Co-citation Analysis in CiteSpace: A Case Study with Active Matter
02/17/2025Research support demonstrates the value of academic libraries and librarians. Recent studies have revealed that research support has been evolving from traditional citation analysis to advanced library services such as research field trend/frontiers analysis and talent evaluation. Using a powerful bibliometric tool CiteSpace and “active matter” as an example, co-citation network analysis illustrates how to identify research trends, active research areas, and intellectual turning point publications. Unique features in CiteSpace are discussed, which were absent from case studies of other major science mapping/bibliometric tools used by librarians. Science and engineering librarians should be able to apply this technique to other research fields.
Informed Transitions’: History, Approaches and Future Directions of a High School Visits Program
01/21/2025Webinar for the joint meeting of the Community Engagement Librarian Discussion Group and the Connecticut Outreach Discussion Group, January 21, 2025.
Exploring the effects of informal feedback on organizational outcomes in academic libraries
01/2025Informal feedback processes are becoming increasingly important across all organizations, including academic libraries. In addition to the dissatisfaction of employees with formal feedback, many issues with formal feedback processes have been studied and reported on over recent years. As informal feedback becomes more prevalent, it is critical for library organizations to understand elements of informal feedback processes and how they impact both employee and organizational outcomes. This study analyzes two important elements of informal feedback processes that are often undervalued, or sometimes lost, in formal feedback procedures: the employee-manager relationship (through supervisor source credibility) and individual employee characteristics (through feedback orientation). This online study of academic library workers (n = 231) analyzed how these informal elements relate to the organizational outcomes of affective commitment and turnover intention. Findings show supervisor source credibility and feedback orientation are both positively related to affective commitment. Only supervisor source credibility, the organization-related variable, was related to turnover intention. Practical implications for academic library managers and future research directions are discussed.