Information School News

Laura Sbaffi (Unfair Means Officer) and Skye Xin Zhao (Introductory Tasks Lead) are the winners of the University of Sheffield 2022 Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Learning and Teaching for the Digital Innovation category. The Vice-Chancellor’s Award is a prestigious and highly competitive award that is designed to encourage, promote and celebrate good practice across the university. As a department, we are very proud to have our staff members winning this award. The award has been awarded in recognition of a suite of resources and support developed since 2020 to support students’ academic transitions and enhance their understanding of Academic Integrity-related concepts, policies, and practices. The resources are a key part of the Information School’s early intervention strategy to provide positive and proactive, and sustained support to students in their academic work. Engaging students as partners, Laura and Skye have developed an online module incorporating a suite of interactive...

The University of Sheffield PRIEST study team have been awarded funding to develop clinical risk-stratification tools to help prevent hospitals in low and middle income countries from becoming overwhelmed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Led by Carl Marincowitz from ScHARR, the team also includes our own Professor Peter Bath and Dr Laura Sbaffi. The project is being conducted with a team from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and aims to develop a risk assessment tool to help emergency clinicians quickly decide whether a patient with suspected COVID-19 needs emergency care or can be safely treated at home to avoid overburdening hospitals particularly in low- and middle- income countries. The project is funded by the International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA). Find out more at this University of Sheffield news story  and this ICODA announcement .

Study on research data management in China Dr Andrew Cox The results of an international collaboration between Andrew Cox and Laura Sbaffi at the Information School and Yingshen Huang, from Peking University, have now been published in the prestigious Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Early view). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24413 The research, based on web site analysis, a survey and interviews, reveals that the support of research data management by Chinese university libraries remains in its infancy. The full reference is: Huang Y, Cox A & Sbaffi L (2020) Research data management policy and practice in Chinese university libraries. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24413

Yingshen Huang, a visiting scholar from the University of Peking, along with Andrew Cox and Laura Sbaffi, presented their paper 'Research Data Management Policy and Practice in China' at the the 15th International Digital Curation Conference on the 17th February. The event, run in Dublin by the Digital Curation Centre in partnership with Digital Repository of Ireland, brought together the various stakeholders that play a role in ensuring digital objects are appropriately created, managed, preserved and shared. The conference - which consisted of workshops, a two day-long main conference and an unconference focussed on community - was held at Croke Park. Keynote Lecture 'Collecting and Curating the National Memory' by Dr Sandra Collins, Deputy Director of the National Library of Ireland. Keynote lecture 'The Internet of Things: Utopia or Dystopia?' by Francine Berman, Edward P Hamilton Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Rensselaer...

The 18th International Symposium for Health Information Management Research (ISHIMR) is being held this year in Kalmar at Linnaeus University. Scientists from all over the world gather to discuss e-health. The overall conference theme for ISHIMR 2020 is "Using digital information for better patient health, care and well-being". The deadline for the submission of poster and paper abstracts has now passed but you can register to attend by clicking here . The deadline for registration is 31st August. The conference is free to attend. We welcome submissions relating to research and development on the conference theme in its broadest sense. The topics of interest for the conference include, but are not restricted to: • Strategies for the Management of Health Data and Information • Health Knowledge Management Strategies • Health Informatics Systems • Clinical Decision Support Systems • Tracking Activities and Health • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Healt...

Yingshen Huang, from Peking University, China, who is working with Andrew Cox and Laura Sbaffi surveying Chinese universities about research data services, presented their joint work at  the CODATA 2019 Conference, held on 19-20 September in Beijing, China. The conference theme was: “Towards next-generation data-driven science: policies, practices and platforms.” Yingshen Huang presented the paper “Research data management in Chinese academic libraries”.

Between June 18th and June 24th, Dr Efpraxia Zamani and Dr Laura Sbaffi travelled to Malawi to carry out fieldwork for their GCRF QR Pump Priming grant on promoting support networks for informal caregivers of people living with HIV in Malawi. The project focuses on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #3: ‘Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages’, and seeks to develop a collaborative network among caregivers, academics, NGOs, local authorities and health trusts for the support of caregivers of people living with HIV/AIDS in Malawi. Malawi is third in world-wide rankings with respect to HIV-related deaths (more than 35,000 deaths in 2017), with 10.6% of the adult population in 2016 being affected by HIV. HIV/AIDS requires a lot of self-management for monitoring symptoms and conducting a healthy lifestyle, while being self-reliant. As a result, considerable support is required to help patients make decisions, adjust their behaviour and adapt to the...

Last week saw the first presentation in a series of joint talks between the Information School's Health Informatics and Information Systems Research Groups in Sheffield. and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.The talks aim to promote research collaboration and knowledge sharing. Dr Laura Sbaffi and Dr Efpraxia Zamani are organising this series and chairing the Sheffield presentations, and Prof Josephine Nabukenya will be chairing the presentations from Makerere. In this first session, PhD student Liliana Sepulveda offered the audience a great overview of her PhD research on "An experiential study of the human-technology relationship between informal caregivers of people with dementia and assistive technologies". There will be similar virtual meetings every month and the next schedule one is for Tuesday 11th June, when a PhD student from Makerere will be presenting their work. More details will be forthcoming. You can view the recording of the session here: ...

Professor Josephine Nabukenya, Chair of Health Informatics in the Department of Information Systems, School of Computing and Information Sciences at Makerere University, Uganda, has paid a five-day visit to the Information School as a guest of Dr Laura Sbaffi and Dr Pamela Abbott, representing the Health Informatics and Information Systems Research Groups, respectively. Josephine’s visit follows on from a five-day research visit made by Drs Sbaffi and Abbott to Makerere University in April to establish research collaborations, which were initiated between Professor Nabukenya and Professor Peter Bath, Chair of Health Informatics and Head of the Information School. While visiting the School, Josephine met researchers mainly in the Health Informatics and Information Systems research groups and presented a seminar on “Transforming Uganda’s Healthcare and Ecosystem Using Health Informatics Research”; details of the seminar are here . She also spent time exploring current research ...

The 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society was held earlier this month in Copenhagen, Denmark. Dr Wasim Ahmed, recent Information School PhD graduate (now assistant Professor at Northumbria University) presented his PhD work at the conference and his trip was funded by the Information School. The paper Moral Panic through the Lens of Twitter: An Analysis of Infectious Disease Outbreaks was co-authored by Head of School and Professor of Health Informatics Peter Bath, and Dr Laura Sbaffi. You can access the paper here .

The first in-depth study of bibliometrics work has identified the key things that professionals need to know to work at different levels of specialism in this area. It is hoped this will help define training needs and improve recruitment. View the published research. View the latest version of the competency model. The work was by Andrew Cox and Laura Sbaffi, with colleague Sabrina Petersohn, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany and Lizzie Gadd, from Loughborough University. It was commissioned by the lis-Bibliometrics group and funded by Elsevier Research International.