Domains of professional practice: analysis of publications in the Journal of the Medical Library Association from 2010 to 2019

The Medical Library Association (MLA) has defined 7 domain hubs aligning to different areas of information professional practice. To assess the extent to which content in the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) is reflective of these domains, we analyzed the magnitude of JMLA articles aligning to each domain hub over the last 10 years. Bibliographic records for 453 articles published in JMLA from 2010 to 2019 were downloaded from Web of Science and screened using Covidence software. Thirteen articles were excluded during the title and abstract review because they failed to meet the inclusion criteria, resulting in 440 articles included in this review. The title and abstract of each article were screened by two reviewers, each of whom assigned the article up to two tags corresponding to MLA domain hubs (i.e., information services, information management, education, professionalism and leadership, innovation and research practice, clinical support, and health equity & global health). These results inform the MLA community about our strengths in health information professional practice as reflected by articles published in JMLA.

In 2018, the Medical Library Association (MLA) announced that it would be restructuring the organization to create member caucuses that would replace the Sections and Special Interest Groups (SIGs). This change was implemented in September 2019 [1].
MLA also announced a plan to establish seven collaborative areas for caucuses, each aligned with a professional practice area, which are called domain hubs [2]. The domain hubs became fully operational in May 2020.
The seven domain hubs and their professional practice areas, as defined by MLA [2], are: Clinical Support Professional practice area covers: evidence-based practice curriculum and habits in health professions, role of librarianship in clinical settings, provision of high-quality health information to consumers.

Education
Professional practice area covers: pedagogy/andragogy, instruction to health professionals, educational technology, librarian as instructor, instructional design, information literacy.

Health Equity & Global Health
Professional practice area covers: development of health information professionals globally, equity in access to health information, international collaborations for MLA and medical librarianship.

Information Management
Professional practice area covers: meta data, representation of information, collection of information, research data management.

Information Services
Professional practice area covers: research assistance, outreach to specific communities, subject knowledge development, expert searching.

Innovation & Research Practice
Professional practice area covers: evidence-based librarianship, informatics, research training, diversity in scientific research, assessment, and evaluation.
See end of article for supplemental content.

Professionalism & Leadership
Professional practice area covers: ethics; equity, diversity, and inclusion; development of leaders; management (human resources, fiscal, project, etc.); influence in health care organizations; education of and advocacy for health information professionals.
In the fall of 2019, a group of Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) Editorial Board members and the Editor-in-Chief came together to map prior JMLA publications to the new MLA domain hubs. The team wanted to better understand the distribution of publications related to each domain hub and identify which practice areas, if any, were under-represented.

CONDUCTING THE ANALYSIS
The Web of Science Core Collection was searched for articles published in JMLA between January 2010 and December 2019. Specific publication types were intentionally excluded since the analysis focused on original research. Knowledge syntheses, original investigations, and case reports were included. Proceedings of the annual MLA meeting, lectures and awards, historical topics, brief communications, memoriam columns, tools and skills, resource and book reviews, virtual projects, commentaries, letters to the editor, and editorials were excluded from this analysis. A total of 453 articles were exported for screening using the Covidence application. Thirteen additional articles were excluded from the sample after exporting due to their publication types.
Once the articles were imported into Covidence and before starting the screening process, the research team participated in a calibration exercise using the same 10 articles to develop a consistent application of the tags that would be used to categorize the articles. The available tags were the 7 MLA domain hubs, as defined by MLA and described in the previous section, plus an " Other " tag that would indicate articles that did not align with any of the domain hubs. Once the team was calibrated, each of the 440 articles were screened by 2 people who applied up to 2 tags per article to indicate with which domain hub the articles were most closely aligned. The team decided that each article could have no more than 2 tags applied to it. Any conflict, indicated by an article having more than 2 assigned tags, was arbitrated by a third person who would determine which 2 tags were most appropriate for that article. Only 28 articles out of 440 required arbitration.

INITIAL RESULTS
A total of 440 articles were screened by 7 reviewers. Every article was assigned at least 1 tag, and 259 articles were given 2 tags. All domain hub tags were applied to articles at least 85 times, except for Health Equity & Global Health, which was only assigned to 18 articles. Twenty articles were tagged with "Other" and pertained to topics including the history of medicine, access services, and health policy, which are not topics or professional areas of practice included in domain hub definitions. The team also identified a lack of inclusion of some relevant library topics in the MLA domain hub definitions. For example, no domain hub definition explicitly includes collection development, so the team decided to assign any articles relating to collections to the "Information Management" domain hub. Figure 1 illustrates how many times each tag was applied to the articles in the dataset, including articles that received two tags. The team explored domains that were frequently tagged together to highlight complementary topics and collaborative domain hubs, but recurring combinations were not frequent. For example, the domains most commonly tagged together were Clinical Support and Education, which were jointly applied to a total of 24 articles out of 440.

SOME CHALLENGES AND ADDITIONAL RESULTS
During the screening process, the research team encountered a wide variety of articles that, for the purposes of this analysis, had to be assigned to at least one domain hub and/or the "Other" category. Some domain hub definitions were so broad that different types of articles were ultimately grouped together. As mentioned above, there were 20 articles that did not fit into any of the domain hub definitions and were categorized simply as "Other." Table 1 illustrates the range of articles that fall into a selection of the domain hubs and articles that were not so easily categorized.
The team also explored the most highly cited articles by domain hub to understand which domain hubs have a wider audience or impact. Table 2 lists the top ten most highly cited articles in the study sample, which represent six out of the seven domain hubs. Articles in this list that received two tags had more citations than the articles receiving only one tag. This is possibly attributed to articles with two tags having a wider audience given that their subject matter relates to two professional areas of practice. The domain hub Professionalism & Leadership is not represented in this table nor is the "Other" category. The articles with the highest citations associated with these two categories received forty-four [1] and seventeen [2] citations, respectively. For context, in this study sample, the average article published in JMLA was cited less than once.