EBL 101
Looking to the Literature: Domains to Help Determine Where to Look
Virginia Wilson
SHIRP Coordinator
Health Sciences Library
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Email: virginia.wilson@usask.ca
Originally published in:
Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 4(2), 182–184. https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/6174/5359
Received: 26 April 2009 Accepted: 26 April 2009
2016 Wilson. This is an Open Access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-Share
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Last time in EBL 101, we looked at matching question types to study designs. The process of determining the type of question you’ve asked can point you in the direction of the research design best suited to answering your question. This time around, we’ll stay with the question in order to help determine where to look for evidence in the literature.
It’s been suggested, and further confirmed through research, that many if not all questions generated in librarianship fall under one or more of the following six domains:
This classification scheme was originally proposed to deal with published research in order to make it “easier to map sources, study types and search strategies pertaining to each domain” (Koufogiannakis, Slater, and Crumley 228). Deciding in which domain your question belongs is helpful in the EBL process. The domain can point you to the type of literature likely to contain articles pertaining to your topic.
As an aside, there is a bit of discrepancy around the domains in some EBL literature that was published around 2004. For example, in Booth and Brice’s Evidence-Based Practice for Information Professionals: A Handbook, reference to the six domains includes Marketing as a separate domain. Koufogiannakis, Slater, and Crumley, in their content analysis of librarianship research, tested the six initially proposed domains, and found that evidence for marketing research was limited and removed it as a separate domain from the list, including it instead in the Management domain. Additionally, based on the results of their content analysis, they added a domain: Professional Issues. So 2004 saw the move from the initially proposed classification taxonomy to the six domains listed above.
It’s time to take your question and find out in which domain it belongs. Each domain has its own definition:
Now that you have more information about your question, it’s time to turn to the literature. The challenging part of evidence-based librarianship is that not only should you look in the Library and Information Studies (LIS) literature, but also further afield in disciplines that relate to your question’s domain(s). The starting point is usually the traditional LIS databases, in addition to the suggestions below.
It is important to think outside the LIS box when looking for evidence to inform your question. Thinking about the question in terms of domains can help you do this and in turn broaden the range of useful resources. But what happens if there is no access to for-fee databases? Next time: Open Access Sources of LIS Evidence.
Works Cited
Koufogiannakis, Denise, Linda Slater, and Ellen Crumley. “A Content Analysis of Librarianship Research,” Journal of Information Science 30.3 (2004): 227-39.
Brice, Anne and Cindy Carson. The Contribution of Evidence-Based Practice to Educational Activities. Evidence Based Practice: An Information Professionals Handbook. Eds. Andrew Booth and Anne Brice. London: Facet, 2004.164-77.
Booth, Andrew. An Evidence-Based Approach to Collection Management. Evidence Based Practice: An Information Professionals Handbook. Eds. Andrew Booth and Anne Brice. London: Facet, 2004. 185-95.
- - - . Evidence-Based Perspectives on Information Access and Retrieval. Evidence Based Practice: An Information Professionals Handbook. Eds. Andrew Booth and Anne Brice. London: Facet, 2004. 231-46.
- - - . Examining the Evidence Base for Reference Services and Enquiry Work. Evidence Based Practice: An Information Professionals Handbook. Eds. Andrew Booth and Anne Brice. London: Facet, 2004. 148-58.
- - - . Towards Evidence-Based Management. Evidence Based Practice: An Information Professionals Handbook. Eds. Andrew Booth and Anne Brice. London: Facet, 2004. 200-09.