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What do physicians do when they don’t know something?
That’s the question that propelled information scientist Dr. Lauren Maggio, professor of medicine and associate
director of research at the Uniformed Services University’s Center for Health Professions Education (CHPE), to pursue a Ph.D. to learn and understand what physicians did when they had clinical questions and how they asked them. She also studied the best way to teach physicians how to find and use information in their clinical practice.
“I’ve always loved education, but now I’m primarily a researcher,” says Maggio. “My current work revolves around health information, the way we create it, disseminate it, and use it. I try to connect physicians, learners, and patients with biomedical information by facilitating access to scientific knowledge for public and professional use.”
Maggio’s published a variety of studies over the years. One study reviewed hospital logs to understand how information resources were being used at the hospital bedside. Another large data study involved working with Wikipedia to understand how people engage with it to make medical decisions. Still another study investigated how parents engage with research reported in the news and how it influences the health decisions they make for their children.
Maggio also researched how journalists used preprints – full draft research papers that are publicly shared prior to being peer reviewed – to communicate science, and the way that scientists and journalists used preprints to communicate with each other. A recent study focused on how journalists use science and how they help communicate it. She worked with a team of journalists to understand how they disseminate information, and how scientists and journalists can work together.
Throughout her research, Maggio notes that one of the things she’s been trying to do in her lab “is to be more transparent with all of our science: depositing our data and depositing our code into online repositories, like Zenodo, so that people can rerun our data if they want to or reuse our datasets. I think we should get as much mileage out of our data as possible, so opening up that work has been really important to us. I have a lot of pride in my team’s work. I’m happy for it to be open and for other researchers to be able to access and use it.”
Maggio has been at USU for about seven years, watching the Health Professions Education program grow from the ground up. CHPE is a provider of health professions education for the military and public health systems. At the Center, she supervises master’s and doctoral degree students, and helps them manage their own projects.
She does a lot of work with understanding her own field of health professions education using bibliometrics. Bibliometrics is a statistical approach that uses information about published items (e.g., books, journal articles) to study publication trends and patterns within an area of research.
For example, Maggio’s research lab has studied the flow of information through the publication process.
“We look at journal article styles to understand how they’re created,” explains Maggio. “We look at their characteristics, which gender is writing them, etc. We also do ‘meta-research,’ which is simply doing research on research. I’m really interested in understanding how to make the experience of conducting and disseminating research even better.”
Maggio’s also an advocate for open science. “Whenever possible, I publish my research in open access journals, so anyone can have access to it. That’s a big deal for me. It’s interesting to see that patients need and want information, but often it’s information that they can’t get because it’s behind a paywall. Often, patients and people who care for them really want to see the same papers that doctors read. It feels wrong that they might not have access to what is relevant to them.”
Another way Maggio ensures her work is available immediately and freely is by pre-printing all of her work, which means depositing it to a preprint server prior to peer review so that people can start talking about it earlier and giving feedback. It’s an open access repository, so just about everyone in the world has access to it.
“The future of open science depends on early career researchers,” Maggio concludes. “Probably the most rewarding part of my job is working with a lot of brilliant and wonderful collaborators, especially many early career researchers whom I mentor at the Center. It’s also important that the senior researchers role model open science practices and share their experiences. It’s critical to encourage them to think broadly about opening up their work, whether through preprinting, publishing open access, or depositing data.”
| Date Taken: | 06.22.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 06.27.2023 07:10 |
| Story ID: | 448039 |
| Location: | BETHESDA, MARYLAND, US |
| Web Views: | 26 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, USU Scientist Shares Research to Improve Information Communication, Health Outcomes, by Vivian Mason, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
