Why every scientist needs a librarian

Nature News · Feb 23, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Walk into a big academic library, and chances are you’ll enter a hushed space with soaring ceilings. “It’s like going into a church or a place of worship,” says Jane Harvell, director of library culture and heritage at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.How to make data open? Stop overlooking librariansBut academic scientists don’t always take full advantage of these temples of knowledge, which have morphed from places full of quiet, dusty stacks to dynamic research centres with the latest technologies. Researchers who do enter these hallowed spaces seeking help with their toughest research questions might encounter coding classes, maker spaces, platforms for citizen-science projects or students and researchers engaged in a hackathon. Librarians like to say that an hour in the library is worth a month in the laboratory, quips Kristin Briney, biology and biological engineering librarian at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. And the Caltech library team points out that a researcher could avoid hours of solo Internet searching by just sending a quick e-mail to a specialist librarian to get the same results.Depending on their positions and skill sets, librarians might have job titles such as information specialist, informationist or knowledge manager. Whatever they’re called, they can help scientists to search every relevant database to start a literature review, ensure they comply with evolving requirements to make their data or papers freely accessible, and separate the good from the bad in search results or code generated by artificial intelligence. Moreover, the need for data experts in the library makes it a possible career path for scientists (see ‘From bench to bookshelves’).“I don’t care whether you’re doing bench research or population data — we’re information people,” says Hal Siden, a clinician-scientist at Canuck Place Children’s Hospice and British Columbia Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, Canada. “We need people to organize the information.”Taming information overloadFor Siden, the need for information assistance became apparent nearly 20 years ago. His research group, which focuses on paediatric palliative care, was juggling enormous bibliographies. The citations, he says, were spread “higgledy-piggledy” across many digital folders.So, in the late 2000s, Siden hired a librarian for his research group to help organize citations and support literature searches. The collaboration was hugely helpful. So helpful, in fact, that his colleagues started asking to ‘borrow’ the information specialist for their own projects. The team’s current research librarian, Colleen Pawliuk, is paid collectively by a handful of research groups at the British Columbia Children’s Hospital Research Institute and Sunny Hill Health Centre, also in Vancouver.The inside out librarian – How libraries are becoming essential research partnersPawliuk supports a variety of efforts, from nominating papers for a journal club that the group runs for parents of children with conditions the researchers study, to supervising library students who do short projects in the lab. And she’s still organizing the group’s citation database — now at more than 9,000 publications — which is housed on the free reference-management platform Zotero. “She’s very much an embedded part of our team,” says Siden.One of Pawliuk’s main roles is to conduct literature searches for systematic or scoping reviews the scientists are writing. Siden says that although he’s savvy in the art of querying the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database, librarians often know more. For example, they’re schooled in the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms that the database uses to categorize papers, and how those search terms have changed over decades. That means they can find relevant papers from now and in the past. And they know when PubMed isn’t the best, or the only, database to use.Research librarian Colleen Pawliuk (left), research coordinator Anne-Mette Hermansen (centre) and parent partner Laesa Kim (right) are integral members of the paediatric health-care research group of Hal Siden (foreground).Credit: Valeria SantosPerforming a top-notch, informationist- supported literature search is particularly important in systematic reviews, which must follow strict methodology and are often used to inform medical practice or policy decisions. In fact, the US National Academy of Medicine and Cochrane, a global non-profit organization headquartered in London that curates a well-respected collection of medical reviews, specifically recommend that review authors consult or even co-author with librarians.Pawliuk, Siden and their colleagues investigated the value of librarians for systematic reviews in a 2024 paper. Pawliuk and another librarian searched five bibliographic databases, focusing on reviews published by researchers in Vancouver, where library closures and other factors made library support inaccessible to some scientists. Ultimately, the researchers analysed 191 reviews. They found that those with a librarian on the author list scored 15.4% higher on their quality assessment than did reviews that didn’t involve an information specialist1.“You can’t really do a systematic review without being in close connection to your library,” says Harvell, who is chair of the library consortium Research Libraries UK, based in London.Librarians can also help with less-intensive scoping reviews, and they’re starting to participate in reviews in fields beyond medicine, such as engineering, says Melanie Gainey, a librarian specializing in science, technology, engineering and mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.How to make your scientific data accessible, discoverable and usefulAlthough AI tools can easily perform a literature search and return citations or a literature summary, some tools frequently cite non-existent papers2 or produce summaries based on abstracts, not full text. And the AI systems themselves can have built-in biases. “Librarians bring critical thinking and human evaluation skills,” says Femi Ibikunle, assistant chief librarian at the National Institute for Freshwater Fisheries Research in New Bussa, Nigeria.That doesn’t mean librarians are anti-AI — far from it. “There are completely valid uses for AI,” says Amanda Whitmire, head of the Harold A. Miller Library at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California. “If you’re navigating that, have a conversation with a librarian.” Information specialists can steer users to the right AI tools and make sure they get trustworthy information. For example, says Whitmire, her library subscribes to the AI assistant scite.ai, which summarizes information using only real papers.Many libraries also house archives of unpublished information. At Hopkins Marine Station, marine ecologist Robin Elahi has found this to be a boon for his work on organisms living in the intertidal zone — the part covered at high tide. The library’s archive includes a rich data set of student research papers going back to the 1940s. Elahi found maps and tables from projects that measured the body sizes of three snail species on the station’s beach. He and his colleagues returned to the same sites in the 2010s and determined that the snails’ average size had shrunk by about one-fifth; this is consistent with the expected effects of climate change3. “Having that historical record in the library has been important to me,” says Elahi.Data-management guidesBut literature is just one facet of the modern library’s offerings.