Haddaway NR, Collins AM, Coughlin D, Kirk S.The Role of Google Scholar in Evidence Reviews and Its Applicability to Grey Literature Searching.PLoS One. 2015 Sep 17;10(9):e0138237A very interesting article that touches upon GS in several contexts, including tracing its improvements over the years. The authors also discuss the debates about how GS works and then also about how  useful it is in finding grey literature for conducting evidence reviews. The article concludes that GS is indeed a useful supplement in searches for evidence, particularly grey literature so long as its limitations are recognised. The authors recommend that the assessment of results from Google…

Kirtley, S.Impactful librarians: identifying opportunities to increase your impactJournal of EAHIL 2015; Vol. 11 (4): 23-28Shona Kirtley suggests how librarians can be highly responsive to research needs of their library users. She specially stresses on creating more awareness of and training people to use the EQUATOR guidelines for reporting various forms of research. Very simply put, if people push up their knowledge about these guidelines, their writing skills and their article appraisal skills become very strong. The article has emerged from the comments in the Lancet Series on Research, where there is a discussion on increasing value and reducing waste in…

Kumar AM, Chinnakali P, Shewade H, Gupta V, Nagpal P, Harries AD.Short EpiData course: do participants use the data entry tool two years post-training?Public Health Action. 2015 Dec 21;5(4):261-5. PMID: 26767181 Dr Ajay Kumar, the first author of this article, shared this study with us, since lots of it was relevant to the scenarios we faced with training. The study describes how the authors conducted workshops on the use of the tool EpiData for data entry of research data, and then studied the impact two years later. They discuss how accuracy in data entry is vital for research, but making students  aware…