The new Medical Library Association research agenda: final results from a three-phase Delphi study.

The Medical Library Association’s (MLA’s) 2007 research policy statement [1] charged the MLA Research Section with defining the MLA research agenda on a recurring basis [2]. In 2008, the MLA Research Section’s Research Agenda Committee used a group consensus technique known as the Delphi method that involved both researchers and leaders to articulate MLA’s twelve highest priority research questions. The MLA Board adopted these twelve questions as the 2008 MLA research agenda. A subsequent article reporting these top twelve questions includes detailed description of the committee’s research methodology [3]. Following several months of deliberation and in consultation with the MLA Board of Directors, the MLA Research Section’s Executive Committee directed the Research Agenda Committee to conduct a new study during 2011, implementing the adaptations recommended in the previous report [4], while upgrading the methodology to improve the answerability of the questions. Although only a few years had passed, it also seemed possible that rapid technological changes and emerging societal conditions would produce a different set of top-ranked research questions. These deliberations led to important changes from the 2008 Delphi study. The 2008 study had generated two questions that were so lengthy and sprawling in their subject coverage that they would have been nearly impossible to answer, requiring that the authors strictly enforce a sixty-word limit during 2011. While the 2008 study had merged the MLA leaders and all members of the MLA Research Section into a single study population, the authors decided against including all Research Section members during 2011, because Research Section membership might reflect support for the research endeavor or a desire to learn more about research rather than actual research experience. Those Research Section members with research experience would be difficult to identify easily. A year after the 2008 study, the authors coincidentally learned of a concurrent 2008 Delphi method process that a team of Swedish researchers implemented for defining the research agenda for all Swedish librarians [5]. The authors otherwise know of no other Delphi method studies on defining a research agenda in librarianship, although, as indicated in the 2008 study report [3], this method has been used by other professions to define their research agendas.