Academic Publishing is Not Neutral: Explorations of Bias and Constructed Authority in Health and Science Knowledge Production in a Term-Long Course for Students

Background: Two librarians at Oregon Health & Science University designed a 1-credit, term-long elective for graduate students in the biomedical sciences that provided students with functional knowledge of information searching and information management through a critical framework. This inclusion of critical information literacy aligned with a shift in 2016 in how the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) framed information literacy. This talk will focus on how the instructors designed the course to facilitate students' recognition that how the authority we grant to information and information sources is “constructed and contextual,” one of the principles in the new ACRL Framework. Audience members for this talk will gain ideas for their own critical information literacy instruction.

Description: Instructors provided weekly content to read or view that guided students to reflect on the non-neutrality of information, including seemingly “objective” scientific information. Some aspects of information creation and appraisal that students were invited to critically reflect on included the problematic nature of how information is categorized in knowledge organization systems, the effects of algorithmic bias on search results in information retrieval systems, how bias shows up in research studies, and biases and exclusions in scientific publishing. Concerning the latter, and the focus of this talk, students recognized that research studies with positive results are much more likely to be published, much of what is published is from researchers or perspectives in the “global north,” alternative paradigms of knowledge production are often ignored or not recognized, and women or people of color are less likely to have their scientific research published. Students developed strategies for discovering and accessing literature representing a broader diversity of scholars/scholarship and for mapping the gaps and biases in the literature related to their research topics. Students also reflected on the politics of citation and how they could improve their own citational practices to better recognize the contributions of marginalized scholars.

Conclusion: An end of term survey and student reflections on their growth over the course of the term in their information practices revealed that students were more aware of and reflective about bias in academic publishing, how to develop more comprehensive search strategies to overcome gaps caused by issues of bias in the research literature, and how to improve their own citational practices in the furtherance of social justice.