Search hedges to improve discovery of animal welfare citations
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The "3Rs" of animal research refers to the replacement, reduction, and refinement of animals in biomedical research. The Animal Welfare Act requires that researchers consider alternatives to painful and distressful procedures that lab animals may undergo. One way to comply with this regulation is to conduct a literature search for the 3Rs (i.e., animal use alternatives) when planning a study using animals. However, 3Rs articles can be difficult to find in bibliographic databases due to inadequate indexing, searcher skill and knowledge gaps. The Animal Welfare Information Center at the National Agricultural Library (USDA) developed search hedges to improve the discoverability of 3Rs literature. This could lead to increased adoption and implementation of 3Rs methods. Search hedges are premade or predetermined search strings. Individuals, including non-librarians, can copy and paste hedges directly into a database to retrieve citations on a specific topic. We have worked in collaboration with librarians from the Search Strategies Working Group to create, test, revise, and publish animal welfare search hedges. In 2022, we published search hedges designed to retrieve citations on 15 species of domestic animals commonly used in research. Throughout 2023, we developed and tested new hedges focused on non-animal models (replacement), environmental enrichment for mice (refinement), and pain/anesthesia (refinement). In addition, AWIC also published two hedges on alternatives to oral gavage for rodents and social housing of laboratory animal species. We plan to assess hedge use by measuring page views and through user feedback. In this presentation, we will give an overview of our two-year process of creating animal welfare hedges. We will discuss the challenges and questions encountered when developing new hedges. We will also discuss our ongoing efforts to establish best practices for testing hedges. We hope that sharing our experience will empower other agricultural libraries to create their own hedges.
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PDF of PowerPoint presentation. 14 slides.