Decolonising literature searching – sharing practice

Today I attended this Academic Libraries North online event. The Library team at Lancaster University have been investigating both the resources and strategies needed to decolonise literature searching, with a criticism of traditional searching being that it is based on established journal databases, uses older terminology, and fails to ‘surface’ resources from the ‘Global South’, with a strong coverage in UK/US/European focused research. The addition of journal, preprint and grey literature searches to a search strategy can decolonise literature searching and improve results. The event included talks from three presenters sharing tools and strategies that can add a valuable worldwide focus to literature searching. 

• Jane Falconer from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine spoke on ‘Decolonising global health, one systematic search at a time.’
• Deirdre Andrew from Leeds University entitled her talk – ‘Addressing racism and bias in the scholarly publishing industry during literature searching training – actions and reflections’
• John Barbrook shared Lancaster University’s approaches to Supporting Decolonising by featuring three resources – Policy Commons, Overton.io and Lens.org.

Here I am sharing just some of the many questions posed by the presenters and in the chat:

• Sources you find (and then potentially use) in your research are dependent on the database/resources you are using for your searches. What you have access to will depend on whether you’re part of an institution that funds access to large databases (if you have access to the latter, you need to acknowledge your privilege). Comments were made on what access those in the ‘Global South’ may not have access to – this also happens within the UK on a more local level as some institutions are less well-resourced.
• Removing language limits from literature searching – What languages do you as the researcher/librarian speak? What translation options are available? How you discover non-English literature? Funding for accessing translated research?
• Interesting question was posed as to whether the extra time involved widening your search to a much broader range of resources / more languages etc brings you back a much wider range of search results?
• If you limit a database to specific geographical regions, what do you actually get? Is it the institution of the author, or the region in which the research took place?
• Do we think that that wider mandates for open access will make a difference in the landscape of material available to researchers?

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash

Practical things to do:

• Get involved in the conversation.
• Incorporate decolonising discussion into your teaching, not just as a specific topic but as good practice for research. Doing this is not just due to decolonisation being a buzz word or topic, it is good librarianship. Don’t see it as extra work, eg use mainstream database as well as resources that are stronger on Global-South research, and applying evaluation techniques to all sources you use.
• When working with international students, involve them, ask about resources from their own countries, ask where they access resources in their own language(s).

Selection of resources shared in the session:

• Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: a modest stop in a vast decolonisation process.
• Beyond Web of Science and Scopus there is already an open bibliodiverse world of research – we ignore it at our peril.
• Lancaster University’s libguide on Decolonising literature searching.
• Lens.org – free resource (originally started as a patent database) which is one of the largest scholarly indexes outside Google Scholar – allows visualisation of data to see which Global South countries may have unexpected research outputs.