Thursday, October 12, 2023

Design Thinking; Citation styles #ECIL2023

photo of pigeons

As my final session at ECIL I attended and liveblog Information Literacy in the Design Thinking process – A Preliminary Research was presented by Dorota Rak (Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland). She identified that design thinking can be seen as a mindset, a methodology or a problem solving philosophy. Rak say that it was “a manifestation of collective intelligence” where students are designers and also use innovative designs. There are three aspects – the institutional area, the operational area (e.g. with tools supporting the design thinking process) and the didactic area. Rak said that librarians had recognised the value of integrating DT, that DT can be a driver of information behaviour, and also that DT can be used to develop practice and learning. Rak identified that IL was “a vauable competency for nuturing social capital”. 
The research problems that Rak addressed were – what information competencies do students need for DT; what tools do they need; what skills do they need. Data was collected through a questionnaire administered to university students and also examination of the literature. The majority of the respondents had a good understanding of both “Information Literacy” and “Design Thinking”. The majority also were able to define their information needs across the DT process. However, some stages were seen as more difficult and in more need of support.
The students were asked how useful they found obtained information across the stages of the Design Thinking process. There were differencies across the stages and also between students on the 2 different programmes surveyed. There were also differences in terms of organising information, and use of different tools. Conclusions included designing a curriculum that effectively integrated information management principles with the dynamic iterative nature of DT. 

The second presentation was “Who Cares?” Defining Citation Style in Scholarly Journals from Pavla Vizváry (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) and Vincas Grigas (Vilnius University, Lithuania). Grigas started by identifying that there are more citation styles (10 thousand) than species of birds! The identified problem is that there are all these styles, you have to follow a style strictly in published journals, people are not expert in all styles, so so authors make mistakes. This is a problem as it’s a burden to authors, but inconsistency makes it more difficult to find articles etc. Their aim was to identify citation styles required by journals in SCOPUS. They had questions such as how cleraly the journals express their requirement. They analysed 270 journals, looking also for types of mistake in citation. They were aiming to understand how different stakeholders (e.g. authors, publishers) are affected. Also they used cognitive load theory – worries about formatting can divert energy from the main task of writing.
Vizváry took over to return to the question of “Who cares”? The answer included publishers, editors, librarians, authors and teachers. Introducing SCOPUS, they looked at Lithuanian and Czech journals and also sampled journals published in other countries, comparing their statistics (such as H index). From this statistical point of view the Czech and Lithuanian journals were similar to each other, but had a slightly different profile to the international sample. Vizváry also noted that there were more English-only journals published in Lithuania and Czech Republic than national language ones, and there were differences in the patterns of open publishing. Moving on to differences in form of intext references (numbers or author names) there were significant differences by subject, and this was more important than differences from country to country.
The most common journal reference style is, sadly, “unnamed” i.e. they just give examples, next was APA. They noted that the ISO format was strong in the Czech Republic, but not elsewhere. In social sciences APA was named a lot, but “unnamed” was the most common in some subjects. 84.4% of journals give example references (others tend to link to the style’s website). They also noted that not all journals include DOIs in their reference styles. There was a question afterwards about whether the “unnamed” styles were actually specific styles, and the authors said that they’d tried some unnamed styles in ChatGPT and it had said in each case that it was like style X, but with these differences. They were thinking of doing more of this ChatGPT-aided diagnosis.

Photo by Sheila Webber: sleepy pigeons in Krakow

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