Knowledge sharing practices among African health sciences librarians.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to investigate knowledge sharing practices among health sciences librarians in African countries. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey design was employed. The study population consisted of African health sciences librarians that attended the 16th Biennial Conference of the Association for Health Information and Libraries in Africa on October 14-18, 2019, at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Data were collected using a questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive statistics. RESULTS: The types of knowledge most commonly shared by respondents were information on conferences, workshops, and seminars as well as information on new trends and technologies in librarianship. The main avenue of knowledge sharing was face-to-face interaction. Unwillingness to share knowledge and a lack of awareness about current trends and issues were the top identified challenges to knowledge sharing. CONCLUSION: These survey results establish the existence of a low level of knowledge sharing among health science librarians in Africa and suggest that concerted efforts should be made to overcome barriers to knowledge sharing within and across African countries.

Development and reliability assessment of a new quality appraisal tool for cross-sectional studies using biomarker data (BIOCROSS).

BACKGROUND: Biomarker-based analyses are commonly reported in observational epidemiological studies; however currently there are no specific study quality assessment tools to assist evaluation of conducted research. Accounting for study design and biomarker measurement would be important for deriving valid conclusions when conducting systematic data evaluation. METHODS: We developed a study quality assessment tool designed specifically to assess biomarker-based cross-sectional studies (BIOCROSS) and evaluated its inter-rater reliability. The tool includes 10-items covering 5 domains: 'Study rational', 'Design/Methods', 'Data analysis', 'Data interpretation' and 'Biomarker measurement', aiming to assess different quality features of biomarker cross-sectional studies. To evaluate the inter-rater reliability, 30 studies were distributed among 5 raters and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC-s) were derived from respective ratings. RESULTS: The estimated overall ICC between the 5 raters was 0.57 (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.38-0.74) indicating a good inter-rater reliability. The ICC-s ranged from 0.11 (95% CI: 0.01-0.27) for the domain 'Study rational' to 0.56 (95% CI: 0.40-0.72) for the domain 'Data interpretation'. CONCLUSION: BIOCROSS is a new study quality assessment tool suitable for evaluation of reporting quality from cross-sectional epidemiological studies employing biomarker data. The tool proved to be reliable for use by biomedical scientists with diverse backgrounds and could facilitate comprehensive review of biomarker studies in human research.