Diverse voices, alternative sources

UTE MANECKE: Welcome to this recording of Diverse Voices, Alternative Sources. My name is Ute, and I'm joined by my colleague Wendy. Slides and handouts for this recording are available on the Join Room page for this recording. There's also a transcript available. We hope you enjoy the recording.

The learning outcomes for this recording are that you will, by the end of this session, be able to define diverse voices, alternative sources to support inclusive research; explain why diverse sources are important to include in your study; identify the challenges of finding diverse voices and information sources; and find reliable, diverse sources in the online library and beyond.

Diverse sources are often found outside academic library collections due to the historic lack of diversity in traditional academic databases. We'll discuss the current situation with academic library collections and consider alternative resources that offer more diverse content. Please note that where your module may require you to do independent research, you will need to follow module advice on what resources you need to use.

Let's start with clarifying what we mean by diverse voices, alternative sources. For the purposes of this recording, we will use the term diverse voices as including all groups whose voices are less represented. For example, because of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, or geography. We define alternative sources, which we use interchangeably with diverse sources, as written or produced by diverse or underrepresented voices, often found outside of mainstream and academic publishing.

So why are diverse voices important? Well, by expanding the range of voices in your research, you will broaden your ideas by uncovering different perspectives. You'll discover hidden histories, challenge prejudice and stereotypes, discover views that are representative of the world, and be equipped to participate in a global and diverse world.

In this context, it's important to bring in the concepts of power and privilege. Individuals have many traits and characteristics. Some characteristics place us in a position of power and privilege. Other characteristics might disadvantage us.

The term intersectionality is important here. It describes multiple characteristics that can make it difficult for voices to be heard. Please take a moment to think about what characteristics you think affect a person's power and privilege. You might want to pause the recording for a minute or so to do this.

This slide shows some characteristics that affect a person's power and privilege, such as gender, skin colour, geographical location, and neurodiversity. You can find more characteristics on Sylvia Duckworth's wheel of power, to which I've given you a link on this slide. And here, it is displayed on this slide in full.

Let's now look at academic sources and the peer review process. A high standard for academic information is peer-reviewed journal articles and academic books. Peer review involves an article being submitted to scrutiny by other academics prior to publication. Academic books go through a similar process.

Articles and books can be obtained usually by subscription in academic databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCO. If peer review results in high-standard information, why might there be problems with the process for underrepresented voices? You might want to pause the recording briefly to think about this question.

There are challenges for diversity in academic publishing. The peer reviewers are generally successful academics, mostly based in the Global North. Academic publishers are also mainly based in the Global North, and have tended to focus on authors from that region.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the Global North as "The countries of the world which are characterised by a high level of economic and industrial development." As opposed to the Global South, which broadly refers to the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the islands of the Pacific.

Articles must be written in a certain format when they are submitted to a publisher, and this can be hard for researchers whose first language is not English and who may not have access to the expensive prestige journals in the first place. It is a challenge to be published in a well-known journal with good indexing and marketing.

To be indexed in one of the main academic databases, a journal must meet strict selection criteria, which presents a challenge for some journals. Newer e-journals, for example, are often not covered by the big databases. Scopus, Web of Science, and JSTOR all require evidence of publication history and volume.

Underrepresented voices are read less, and therefore cited less. Generally, publications that don't follow the traditional article format often don't get included in the main academic databases. And English is currently the dominant language of academia, so publications in other languages are often less frequently included in the main academic databases.

So this can be illustrated by having a look at this slide. So while there is evidence that publishers are recognising the challenge and there are improvements in the inclusion of global voices in the larger databases, the graph on this slide of the number of journals indexed by region in the database Scopus in 2023 shows that the number of publications from the Middle East, Africa, Central and South America are dwarfed by the number of publications from Western Europe and North America, even though 20% of the content in Scopus is published in a language other than English.

So if we are making a conscious effort to include more diverse sources within our research, we will need to uncover information about the authors. This slide covers some of the ways you might approach this.

So what you can do is that you can run a search on the internet on the authors' names and affiliations. You can look at their profiles on their institutions' websites and on social media, such as LinkedIn and Bluesky. Look out for self-identifications. For example, use of gender pronouns. And also check their country of residence.

And please know that it's not always possible to identify the categories authors would come under. In that case, don't make any assumptions.

We have mentioned that diverse voices are underrepresented in mainstream publishing and academic databases earlier on. However, there are tools and filters in the databases that you can use to find information about the author and their country of origin and affiliation. So we'll demonstrate these options later in the session.

And here's an activity for you. Spend about three minutes researching the author Meg-John Barker. A good place to start might be their book Barker, M-J. (2013) Mindful counselling and psychotherapy, practicing mindfully across approaches and issues. London, SAGE.

So find out what you can. Use a web search about the author Meg-John Barker to do this. And pause the recording here to do this activity, and then resume the recording.

You might have noticed that Meg-John Barker uses the pronouns they and them on their blog to clarify their gender identity. The purpose of this exercise is to explore the process of looking for information about the diversity of an author.

Our example, Meg-John Barker, is a well-established author based in the UK who writes on creativity, gender, and sexuality. Their work is available in traditional academic databases and retrievable through our library search engine Library Search.

As we saw earlier when we discussed power and privilege, some authors have characteristics which are both underrepresented-- for example, in this case, gender identity-- and privileged. In this case, they are a white academic from the Global North. So you can see Meg-John Barker being an example of this.

And other characteristics we might want to think about, but which are more challenging or might be more challenging to discover, can be disability and sexuality. They are not always easy to determine. Ethnicity is also not always straightforward to determine from a photo and a name.

So here are some suggestions of what you can do if you want to include more alternative voices and diverse sources in your reading and research. The library has a collection that shows resources that represent a range of voices. Follow the link on this slide to find out more.

You often find some examples of diverse voices and sources in your module material as well. And it's a good idea to follow diverse academics in your subject area. We've provided a link with suggestions on this slide.

Some content in library subscription databases include diverse sources too. So unless your assignment tells you otherwise, you might want to spend more time looking at grey literature. So I'm going to explain what I mean by grey literature at this point.

A loose definition of grey literature is that it's literature not published for commercial purposes. Examples of grey literature are blogs, conference proceedings, different types of reports, and social media posts. Grey literature can be found by going to an organisation's website, or by an internet search, or following links in other sources. Grey literature needs to be evaluated carefully due to the lack of peer review when it's published.

That brings us to evaluation, and we now want to look at how to evaluate the quality of the resources we find, especially as many of them might not be peer-reviewed. We will have to make sure that they are reliable resources.

So you might have come across the PROMPT evaluation framework, which is frequently used at the OU. And this is used for evaluating sources. PROMPT is an acronym, and its letters stand for Provenance, Relevance, Objectivity, Method, Presentation, and Timeliness.

In terms of diverse perspectives, provenance is very important. Find out what you can about the authors of any sources you use. Consider all your reading. Does your research include a range of different perspectives? Are there any points of view that you have not considered? And do the authors state clearly the viewpoint they are taking and their positionality?

Of course, you need to make sure that the information is relevant as well. And to consider the objectivity of your reading, you need to recognise the positions represented in what you read.

Information is presented from a position of interest, whether this is intentional or not. It is the same for you as the reader. You will hold your own belief system, which will influence your ability to objectively appraise information.

It's impossible for an individual to let go of these beliefs, but acknowledging them during the research and critical reading process will support a more objective reading. The key point here is that when conducting research, you need to be alert to any omissions or biases you might encounter in the research of others.

Think about the method as well of your source. How was the research carried out? And consider how the information was presented. And in terms of timeliness, reflect on whether the research is still valid or too old.

For more details on the PROMPT framework and evaluating information, you might want to access the Assessing the Reliability of Information for your assignment training session, or the recording which you can find on our Training and Events page.

So when looking for diverse sources, the following prompt questions might be particularly useful. Are the sources by diverse authors? Are the sources from different countries, including the Global South? Are diverse voices included in the material? And do any of the sources reinforce stereotypes?

We use these and other prompting questions when we write library material. And as we've seen earlier, these questions are not always easy to answer. But we can try to find at least some more information about the authors by searching for it, and by also checking how they self-identify.

WENDY: We'll now show you how to find alternative sources on a topic and how to quickly evaluate them. We'll start by looking at how we might use the library to search for sources that include diverse voices. In this case, voices from the Global South or underdeveloped countries.

We will use a topic, how cash crops-- for example, coffee-- provide food security in Ethiopia. We'll then ask you to search for some alternative sources and select sources using our pointers. I'm now going to share my screen. And you should now be able to see the library website.

So we'll start with Library Search, which searches across many of the library's collections. I'm about to enter the search terms cash crops and coffee and Ethiopia and food security.

So we have a few results that looks relevant to our topic. Let's have a look at the first article in our results, which is "Cash Crops and Food Security, Evidence from Ethiopian Smallholder Coffee Producers." To access the article, I'm selecting the title link. Then I shall select a link to the publisher's website-- in this case, Taylor and Francis-- to access the article.

So the article is now on my screen. So the authors' names are displayed under the title of the article. Hovering over the author's name displays information about the authors, which shows that at least two of them are based in Ethiopia. The abstract or summary of the article outlines how the authors collected data from 1,600 Ethiopian coffee farmers.

So we found an article which gathers evidence from Ethiopian farmers and is written by authors who are based in Ethiopia or the Global South. So we've previously mentioned that peer-reviewed articles and library databases heavily represent voices from the Global North. However, it is possible to find articles written by authors from the Global South, although this may vary depending on the topic.

Information about the authors and the abstract or summary of the article can help to identify which of our search results include diverse voices. And you can often find more information in an article, such as the research methodology or details about research funding, that might help you make a judgement.

So we mentioned earlier that grey literature, which hasn't gone through a formal publication process, can be a source of diverse voices. There are different ways to find grey literature. For instance, use a search engine, such as Google, or search on a website for relevant organisation. We can also follow up references to grey literature in a useful academic article. So let's have a look at the references in our article.

So the article references include journal articles, books, and grey literature. We can identify journal articles and books from the references. For instance, Reference 5 is a reference to a journal article. It indicates the journal title, the volume, and the issue number. Whereas Reference 7 is a reference to a book, which includes a book title, place of publication, and publisher.

A reference to grey literature, often a report or working paper, will include the name of an organisation. For example, in Reference 11, the organisation is the World Bank.

So many of the authors listed in these references are linked to organisations from the Global North. And much of the grey literature-- for example, reports from organisations such as the World Bank-- that's in Reference 11 and 12-- or the Centre for African Studies in Reference 15-- are from organisations based in America or Europe. So while grey literature can provide access to diverse voices, grey literature, like peer-reviewed journals, may often provide a perspective of the Global North, so you may need to select your grey literature carefully.

It may be worth following up Reference 30, which is to a report from the Addis Ababa International Food Policy Research Institute on "Household perception and demand for better protection of land rights in Ethiopia," as the organisation appears to be based in Ethiopia. So we can use a search engine to find the organisation.

So to do that, I will search for the International Food Policy Research Institute. And once I've accessed the organisation's website, I can search for the working paper that we identified in the list of references for the journal article.

So the working paper was called "Household perception and demand for better protection of land rights in Ethiopia." So I'll now use the organisation's Search option, enter the name of the paper, and search.

So we have a few results. And if I scroll to the bottom, I can see the paper we're looking for. "Household perception, demand for better protection of land rights in Ethiopia." So I'll select a link for more information. First of all, I have some details about the report. And then I can download the full report.

And you may also find other relevant papers on this website. So if you find a useful organisation, it's often worthwhile searching that website for papers and grey literature. So while the International Food Policy Research Institute is based in Washington, browsing the content of the Addis Ababa branch shows that much of the research is carried out by local researchers.

So so far, we've used Library Search to find an academic source that includes voices from the Global South, and we followed up a reference to find grey literature. So we'll now look at searching within the library's Diverse Voices collection. It's a collection of resources that represent a range of voices. So I'll go back to the library Home page.

So to access the Diverse Voices collection, I'm selecting Library Resources, a link at the top of the screen. Then on the right, I'm selecting a link to Explore Curated Resources. But in that page, I can select a link to Diverse Voices. So I've now accessed a page which includes different types of resources which explicitly seek to provide access to writers and resources from diverse groups who are typically underrepresented in commercial publications, such as databases.

So there's a range of sources on this page, but I'll select African Journals Online database, as it looks the most relevant to our topic. So I'm selecting the link to access the database.

So the database is a platform of African-published scholarly journals. It's a nonprofit organisation that works to increase global and continental online access to African-published, peer-reviewed research.

So I can look for journals with specific countries. For example, I can find 66 articles from Ethiopia. So potentially, I could access these articles, individual journals and search within the journals.

But for the purpose of this demonstration, I am going to search across all the journals in African Journals Online. So I could enter my search terms again that we used earlier on Library Search to find a journal article. I'm going to pop the search terms into search engine, and click on Search.

So search was cash crops and coffee and Ethiopia and food security. So 122 results. So I can browse down and check whether there's anything of interest. So potentially, "Commercialization of Coffee Production in Coffee-Based Farming Systems" in Ethiopia might be interesting. So I can select the title link.

And first of all, under the title, we have a list of authors and information about the authors. It shows that they're both based in an Agricultural Research Centre in Addis Ababa. And to access the full text, I can simply download the PDF, which is on the-- to the left of the title.

So far, we've used Library Search, which searches across many of the library's collections. We found an academic journal article, followed up a reference, and we've explored resources in our Diverse Voices collection.

I'd now like to look at one of the library's databases, Scopus. It's a large, multi-disciplinary database that was mentioned earlier, and we'll look at its Refine options and how it might help us find diverse voices.

So to find Scopus, the easiest way to do it is just to use Library Search. So I'll enter the name of the database into Library Search, select Search, and the database will appear.

So if I select a link to Scopus, I will access the database. So I can enter some search terms. And this time, I shall enter coffee and Ethiopia and food security So I've entered my search terms, and then I'll select the Search button.

So a number of results. We've got 47 results. On the left of the screen there are some Refine options, which were mentioned earlier in the session. So we can look at these to help us find voices from the Global South or Ethiopia.

So first of all, we can look at affiliation, and we can see that some of the authors are affiliated to universities based in the Global South. Some are affiliated to universities based in the Global North. So you might want to select the universities based in the Global South.

And another Refine option you could look at is the funding sponsor. Again, you might look at whether you want to see whether the funding comes from the Global South or whether it comes from the Global North, and whether there might be any potential bias linked to funding which comes to the Global North. It's not always the case, but it's just a point to consider. So these are useful Refine options which will help you find diverse voices.

So this demonstration is to introduce you to ways of finding diverse voices in the Open University Library. And just to recap, we've used Library Search. We've followed up a reference to find grey literature, which you could also find by just a general web search.

We've looked at our Diverse Voices collections. And we've looked at one of the databases, which is available within the Open University Library. So I'll now stop sharing my screen, and we will return to the slides.

It's now your turn. So we suggest you spend around 10 minutes looking for information on either a topic of your choice or one of the topics on this slide. So the topics suggested are the impact of climate change on food production. So you could try the search terms climate change and food production.

A second topic is community participation in health care, so you could try the search terms community participation and health care. And the third option-- suggested option is discrimination of a particular group, LGBTQ and ethnicity. So you could perhaps try the search terms discrimination and race, or try a topic of your own choice.

So you can try Library Search. There's a link to Library Search on this slide. You can explore Diverse Voices collection, or you could try a search engine to look for grey literature.

Try and identify results that include underrepresented voices. For example, ethnicity, geographic area, or sexuality. You might like to pause the recording for a few minutes for this activity.

UTE MANECKE: If you would like more information and guidance on the topic, you can follow the links on this slide. The first link, Diverse voices, alternative sources, is a companion activity to this recording. The second link takes you to the aforementioned wheel of power and privilege by Sylvia Duckworth. The third link goes to a website called The Open Notebook, which is a website that contains many useful diversity, equality, and inclusion resources.

So where can you go for help after this? The library helpdesk is available to help you whenever you need us, and our contact details are available on every page of the library website. The phones are staffed 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday, or you can send an email. We also have a webchat service, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And finally, as mentioned earlier, these slides are available to download alongside a handout which summarises everything that has been covered in this recording. You can download these from the page that gave you more information about the session.

So to sum up, you will now be able to define diverse voices, alternative sources to support inclusive research; explain why diverse resources are important to include in your study; identify the challenges of finding diverse voices and information sources; and find reliable, diverse sources in the online library and beyond.

And that's the end of the recording. If you have time, it would be really appreciated if you could click on the link to leave some feedback. We are always looking to improve our sessions and recordings, and your feedback lets us know what we can do to make it better for you. Thank you very much for listening.