distance learning workshop during the COVID-19 lock-down
Librarians from Health University Library of Rennes 1 used to train each year about 110 medical interns (6-8th year of University) to
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perform more efficient research with Pubmed or other search engines including the library catalog, Google Scholar, EBM databases, etc.
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retrieve, organize and edit bibliographic information with Zotero (an open source bibliographic management sotfware). This session uses to take 6 hours (3 hours for each part). During the coronavirus crisis, we had to convert all our scheduled face-to-face workshops into e-learning training sessions. The lack of available trainers made compulsory to reduce the content of the initial session. Whereupon we agreed with the Faculty staff in charge of this diploma to reduce the number of training hours to three and to focus on bibliographic management. The original workshop on information research was partially replaced by some simple tasks to do at home prior to the session :
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carefully selecting a paper about COVID-19 or SARS-COV2 on Pubmed that seems to be particularly enligthening or important to the student (enough to be worth sharing with peers)
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selecting a paper on MedRxiv or BioRxiv on the same topic
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selecting a paper on Pubpeer on the same topic that has received at least 5 comments.
Moreover students received instructions to download and set Zotero on their computer and were asked to do it before the session.
As an introduction, we wanted to show how scientific communication is accelerated during crisis such as COVID-19. This phenomenon increases the risk of making sloppy or dubious papers available to the public and feed common errors or consipationist theories. We also presented the growth of prepublications and post-reviewing comments as an opportunity for Science (quicker access to results and wider access to scholarship conversation)
- slide 1: The figure shows the traditional publishing cycle compared to the one including the deposit of a preprint, an option accepted by a growing number of publishers. Each journal's policy about preprints may be checked on SherpaRomeo website. Depositing a preprint guarantees the authorship of a discovery and allows a quicker access to the results.
- slide 2: The homepage of Biorxiv repository shows a warning about papers that it gives access to. The status of these "publications" should not be mixed with the status of duly peer-reviewed articles. A confusion sometimes happened among the public but also among journalists who are not specialized in sciences but had to cover COVID-19 crisis (More on that here
- slide 3: shows the progressive definition of SARS-COV2 R° (Disease basic reproductive number ) from the first preprints issued on the subject to the final peer-reviewed articles. Fortunately a lot of COVID-19 studies available on a preprint server could be reviewed and published afterwards, sometimes with only minimal corrections. The figure is extracted from an article published in Global Health.
- slide 4 On the other side, preprints servers may host hastily edited or questionable articles such this one which was used by Luc Montagnier to forge a new conspiracy theory (more about this on wikipedia. Papers are very seldom retracted on preprint servers. The negative impact of this controversial study led the site managers to put a retractation warning on the article page.
- slide 5 One comment found on Pubpeer about one study on hydroxychloroquine was reproduced here. The comment raises the issue of a peer-review process which was conducted with too much haste. Another issue points out a conflict of interest between the authors and the editors. This slide gives opportunity to the trainers to explain some basic rules of scientific integrity.
- slide 6 Scientific misconducts or even sloppy science can lead to retractation. Trainers may mention here the prominent role of the retractationwatch website that tracks and analyses the retractations occurred on scientific publishing platforms.
- slide 7 is an invitation to medical interns to discuss with trainers but also with each other about their validity criteria and trustfull sources, since in such a crisis, being well-informed is a critical and vital issue, especially for young practitioners who may be required to help hospital staff to face COVID-19 pandemia.
The following instructions were given to the students on the Libguides website of the Library. PDF archive of these pages are provided in this repository.
After this introduction, students were asked to create local collections in order to save the pre-selected papers mentioned above. Then by opening their word processor (Microsoft Word, LibreOffice or Google Doc) and filling it with lorem ipsum they were asked to insert these citations. In most of the cases, when issues were met at that stage, they were solved by downloading a more recent version of Java.
This task requires students to create a Zotero account and to join a collaborative bibliography. To keep close to the context, we suggested them to join the bibliography on SARS-Cov2 initiated by ENS school which is set "open membership" and contains a collection for medical references. This exercise makes students familiar to the management of a large amount of references (navigation between files, deduplication, use of markers i.e tags to index items, etc.). More advanced students were invited to take some time to curate collections. For instance, automated processes were provided to help them to spot items with date/author fields left blank.
The 10 sessions were held with VIA learning Solution which our University had subscribed to. There were never more than 10 students registered for a single session. 2 Librarians were connected all along the session. When several students were dealing with the same session (for instance, Java environment update), VIA (like BigBlueButton) makes possible to gather these students in a "separate room", where oral explanations given by one of the librarians will not disturb other students monitored by the second librarian.
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