Terminology and trend watching via ResearchRaven

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to discuss the importance and value to librarians of keeping up with new trends and terms occurring in the scholarly literature before they become commonplace. The paper makes several arguments as to why doing so helps librarians remain relevant to patrons in an increasingly challenging library environment. Also suggested are ways that librarians can create web services that leverage the knowledge they gain about the new terms with which they have gained some expertise. Design/methodology/approach – This paper contains a discussion of the author's own experience in developing the free online web service ResearchRaven, and notes the rise of certain new terms (e.g. epigenetics) in the health sciences. The new terms' appearance in calls for papers for meetings, in calls for papers for publication and in grant funding announcements signaled that the increasing use of single words or short phrases in such venues offers opportunities for librarians to develop expertise in the subject area – and to develop web applications growing out of such expertise. Findings – This paper provides empirical insights into reasons why librarians need to keep to keep up with the rise and incidence of new scholarly terms and coinages, long before they appear in the scholarly literature and in such databases as PubMed. The paper also details how librarians can use the e‐mail alerts and RSS feeds of ResearchRaven to keep informed, and suggests avenues for developing comparable web services to showcase their own libraries and existing services (e.g. institutional repositories). Originality/value – This paper fulfills a need to encourage librarians to track the use of new terms in the health sciences and in scholarship generally, to gain familiarity with such terms, to follow with erudition and acumen the rise of nascent fields and the interactions among many disciplines, to spot opportunities to develop web services and applications to serve those new communities, and to convey to existing disciplines news of developments that might be of interest to them, thereby rendering their libraries ever more innovative in practice while at the same time adding value for patrons.