challenges of Covid-19. As part of a project team exploring system recovery, we initially carried out literature searches on how health systems recovered from past disasters (e.g. pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters, terrorist attacks), but it soon became apparent there was a wealth of new information being produced about the current pandemic itself and at a very rapid rate. It was fairly early on into the work we realised we needed to find an efficient way of keeping track of new information and for this we used a combination of alerts and a virtual project space as well as being aware that other librarians were also tracking recovery and we wanted to avoid duplicating efforts. Generally, we look to examples within the UK or other similar health systems so we can make comparisons. But Covid-19 is so international that we have been looking at research papers globally, including China, South Korea and the US. We immediately saw the gap between the few peer-reviewed articles available and the plethora of opinion pieces and news items. We presented updates to the project team on a weekly basis and got feedback on what information they found useful, what they needed more of and what area we needed to work on for the following week. Social care was like stepping off the platform at Oxford Circus tube station: there was a very large gap. A very limited number of published articles on how social care performed in previous disasters are available. There are many reasons for this but identifying this gap helped refine the scope of the work and the information we needed to seek from other source types.
Mainstream media has also been useful with our Covid-19 research. The King’s Fund library team is also responsible for producing the internal press update, so we are on-the- ball with this content. Stories are not always accurately reported in the news and we have all experienced elements of misinformation during this pandemic. From stories about ‘how eating garlic can prevent getting a coronavirus’ to ‘Covid-19 only affects older people.’ However, news articles, used sensibly, can provide up-to-date leads about research currently underway.
At times I think we’re turning the hierarchy of evidence on its head. In the absence of systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials, grey literature has played a crucial role in understanding the latest on something like Covid-19. Here rapid reviews or scans are the name of the game. The trend is to publish first, review after, and to get the study out as soon as possible. Research in progress can also be found, an example is the Strategy Unit, which has helpfully listed various projects exploring the impact of Covid-19 includ- ing the Fund’s project on system recovery.
June-July 2020 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 49
Flinders University, Australia.
The future of grey literature Over the last few months I have noticed how health librarians worked collaboratively across organisational boundaries to share their literature searches to avoid duplica- tion and provide greater awareness of the work going on across the NHS and it’s been fascinating looking at what topics people are searching and their approach.
Grey literature is expanding and creating new grey areas for us to consider and question. This was very much on my mind when we started to think about review- ing our inclusion criteria for The King’s Fund’s digital archive. In recent years we have expanded the types of material that The King’s Fund publishes online. Formats like long reads and blogs offer insights and a view on a specific issue, our infographics and animation capture a con- cept. So, if we consider these to be important and relevant from The King’s Fund’s work, we would use the same criteria for the other organisations we rate.
If I had a wish list on the information I
would like to see in the public domain, it would be that more organisations produced cases studies evaluating how a new model of care or a new initiative worked – or indeed didn’t work – so we could share these insights with others. I am hopeful we might see more of this post-Covid-19 so we can capture learning on what worked well and what didn’t in a disaster. I would also like publishers to keep up this pace of publishing. It has been great to see evaluations of inter- ventions for staff wellbeing, for instance, being published within weeks instead of months, along with the added bonus of publishers making these studies freely available.
Grey literature is a bit ephemeral and the boundaries are blurry at times but fundamentally it requires us to be con- fident in our expertise in searching. It takes some judgement, lateral thinking and for us to be open to new formats that might just spark thinking or lead to the perfect study. IP
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