10.2 Projects, groups and other opportunities

  • Projects and working groups are a good way to network beyond your editorial base and develop new skills. Cochrane provides many opportunities for involvement in working groups, committees and projects. Look out for notices on the Information Specialists' mailing list advertising vacancies.
  • Joining the Cochrane Information Specialists' Executive provides an opportunity to become involved in CIS-specific and organisation-wide issues. There is generally a call for volunteers to join the Executive via the Information Specialists' mailing list.
  • It is helpful to join the Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group (IRMG), whose remit is to provide advice and support, to conduct research and to facilitate information exchange regarding the information retrieval activities of Cochrane.
  • Cochrane Crowd RCT Identification (formerly the Embase Project).  Embase RCT records get into the CRS and CENTRAL via one of two routes: a set of records that can be identified from their Emtree tags as being RCT or CCT are downloaded every month, and are published immediately. A second set of records is identified by searching for specific terms then manually screened by a number of screeners using a "crowd-source" model.  To be part of the Cochrane Crowd RCT Identification project, sign up at http://crowd.cochrane.org/index.html
  • The Information Specialists' Portal is a great source of information on professional development.
  • HLWIKI Canada is an open, freely-accessible wiki with portals on health librarianship, social media and a range of information technology topics, curated by a team of Canadian health librarians.
  • SuRe Info is a web resource covering the information retrieval aspects of producing systematic reviews and health technology assessments. It seeks to help information specialists stay up-to-date with the latest developments by providing easy access to current methods papers, and supports more research-based information retrieval practice.
  • PubChase is a service which alerts you when papers get retracted. PubChase is linked to Retraction Watch and PubMed, and if a paper is retracted you can get a notification via PubChase. This links to the report of why the papers was retracted on Retraction Watch. Find out more here. Retraction Watch is a useful blog, which you can subscribe to via email. The aim is to track and publicise retractions from August 2010 onwards. Find their rationale here and find the blog here.