Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 2011, 7.2 

 

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   Evidence Based Library and Information Practice  
 

 

 

News/Announcements 
 

Congratulations to our Associate Editors  

 
 2012. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐

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permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly 

attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the 

same or similar license to this one. 

 

 
On April 26, 2012, the Canadian Library 

Association (CLA) released a statement where 

it said “The CLA is pleased to announce that 

the winners of the 2012 Robert H. Blackburn 

Distinguished Paper Award are Lorie Kloda, 

Denise Koufogiannakis, and Katrine Mallan, 

who are honoured for their 2011 paper 

entitled, "Transferring evidence into practice: 

what evidence summaries of library and 

information studies research tell practitioners," 

published in Information Research (16:1, 

March 2011). 

 

This study examines the critical appraisals of 

library and information studies published in 

the form of evidence summaries within 

Evidence Based Library and Information 

Practice from 2006-2008. Critical appraisal is a 

crucial aspect of evidence based practice, and 

evidence summaries "provide a synopsis and 

critical appraisal of published research in order 

to facilitate the transfer of research into 

practice." Evidence summaries save the time of 

the practitioners who read them and provide 

them with the benefit of others' expertise. The 

results of the study show that evidence 

summaries reveal more weaknesses than 

strengths in library and information research 

published within this journal. Critical 

appraisal writers found frequent weaknesses 

in validity and reliability of library and 

information research studies, and this finding 

should have significant impact because it will, 

as the authors suggest, strengthen the body of 

research within the field by helping to identify 

weaknesses and pitfalls, whereas noted areas 

of strength will provide "examples of good 

practice that new researches can model." 

 

Paradoxically, the summary writers still found 

that even with flawed methodology, the 

results of the research studies appraised were 

still applicable. Research articles in the field 

yielded elements that were relevant to practice, 

even if the actual results came from weak 

methodology. This paradox caused the authors 

to ask why and how this could be the case, and 

subsequent research into this question could 

further improve the quality of research, as well 

as improve the quality of evidence summaries 

themselves. 

 

The Robert H. Blackburn Distinguished Paper 

Award is named for Dr. Blackburn, the first 

President of CACUL (1963-64).  The award 

annually recognizes notable research 

published by Canadian Library Association 

Members.  The Robert H. Blackburn 

Distinguished Paper Award will be presented 

at the CLA National Conference and 

Tradeshow taking place at the Ottawa 

Convention Centre, May 30 - June 2, 2012. 

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