Holly Grossetta Nardini's blog

Happy Peer Review Week!

Happy Peer Review week! Despite many criticisms and calls for reform1,2,3 peer review remains an intrinsic part of the academic scholarly lifecycle. Like faculty, librarians are deeply involved in peer review – both receiving peer review on our own scholarship and volunteering our peer review services to journals. In particular, librarians are skilled at reviewing methodologies and search strategies for evidence syntheses papers like scoping and systematic reviews. In evidence synthesis, the quality of the literature search, and the clarity with which it is reported, are foundational! Research from Cushing/Whitney Medical Library librarians has shown that librarians could play a larger role in the peer review process4. If you are a journal editor, you can use the Librarian Peer Reviewer Database to find qualified and available librarians to review aspects of submitted manuscripts. “Segmented peer review” is an excellent way of involving librarians in partial peer review of manuscripts5, as few individual peer reviewers have the knowledge to evaluate all aspects of team science manuscripts. Yale librarians are also available to consult on all aspects of scholarly publishing. References 1. Gerwing TG, Allen Gerwing AM, Avery-Gomm S, Choi C-Y, Clements JC, Rash JA. Quantifying professionalism in peer review. Research Integrity and Peer Review [Internet]. 2020 Jul 24 2. Gerwing TG, Allen Gerwing AM, Choi C-Y, Avery-Gomm S, Clements JC, Rash JA. Re-evaluation of solutions to the problem of unprofessionalism in peer review. Research Integrity and Peer Review [Internet]. 2021 Feb 16 3. Brainard J. The $450 question: Should journals pay peer reviewers? Science [Internet]. 2021 Mar 1 4. Grossetta Nardini HK, Batten J, Funaro MC, Garcia-Milian R, Nyhan K, Spak JM, et al. Librarians as methodological peer reviewers for systematic reviews: results of an online survey. Res Integr Peer Rev. 2019;4:23. 5. Nyhan K, Nardini HKG. Evidence synthesis papers would benefit from segmented peer review. Translational Oncology [Internet]. 2021 May 1

The Yale MeSH Analyzer

The Yale MeSH Analyzer Two of our librarians, Lei Wang and Holly Grossetta Nardini, have developed a web-based tool to simplify search design and refinement for major, comprehensive database searches. This tool was released at NAHSL’15 in Providence this past October and is primarily for those involved in comprehensive database searching and systematic review research teams. At Yale, based on work by Jan Glover, we have a "best practice" for major searches: creating a MeSH analysis grid. A MeSH analysis grid helps us identify problems in a search strategy by showing how key articles are indexed in the MEDLINE database in an easy-to-scan tabular format. Creating a MeSH analysis grid manually is useful for search validation but time-consuming. The Yale MeSH Analyzer removes the tediousness from the process by automatically retrieving the article metadata and formatting and generating a grid. Using the tool is easy: simply paste a list of up to 20 PMIDs into the text box and click "Go.” You can delimit the PMIDs in any way you like, even pasting in a paragraph that includes text. The Analyzer will scan for PMIDs and attempt to retrieve article data from PubMed, creating a grid in either HTML or Excel for you to manipulate. There are other customizable options, and you can install a browser button on your toolbar to do an analysis in one step. You can then easily scan the grid and identify appropriate MesH terms, term variants, indexing consistency, and the reasons why some articles are retrieved and others are not, a common frustration for expert searchers. This inevitably leads to fresh iterations of the search strategy to include new terms. In addition to MeSH terms, author-assigned keywords, article titles, and abstracts can be included in the analysis display. We hope that this tool helps you refine your searches and saves you time. We would love to hear your feedback.