Introduction: The process of evidence-based librarianship is fundamentally associated with the generation and use of evidence in practice. A considerable number of factors have meant the evidence base in health librarianship is slow to populate, and that much of the evidence lacks rigour. To date, there have been no studies that examine issues of research engagement exclusively within the context of health librarianship. This thesis set out to answer the question, what are the barriers to and priorities for research engagement in health librarianship? Methodology: Three literature reviews were conducted, the first was a critical review of research within health care and health librarianship, whilst the second and third respectively reviewed the use of focus groups and surveys to investigate research engagement in health librarianship. These were followed by the conducting of a focus group and a national survey. Both studies included representatives from different disciplines of health librarianship. The focus group aimed to gain consensus on aspects associated with research in health librarianship and inform development of the survey. The survey aimed to gain a national picture of research engagement and clarify the barriers to and priorities for research development as perceived by health librarians. Results: The focus group reached consensus on five key barriers and five key priorities to research engagement in health librarians. The survey returned 316 usable responses and analysis revealed no relationship between the research related training and levels of research experience. The perceived importance health librarians place on their role in terms of developing research skills and evidence based practice was not found to be related to either research experience or research training. The survey also revealed perceptions of research in health librarianship are linked to a number of other factors including a diverse understanding of what research is. Conclusion: This is the first and largest study of its kind to explore research development and engagement specifically in health librarianship. The study provides a new definition of research and identifies key barriers and priorities for research in health librarianship. It also provides recommendations that should benefit the health librarian community by supporting the strategic development of research.

In this thesis, we propose a new approach to Chinese-English Biomedical cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) using query expansion based on the eCMeSH Tree, a Chinese-English ontology extended from the Chinese Medical Subject Headings (CMeSH) Tree. The CMeSH Tree is not designed for information retrieval (IR), since it only includes heading terms and has no term weighting scheme for these terms. Therefore, we design an algorithm, which employs a rule-based parsing technique combined with the C-value term extraction algorithm and a filtering technique based on mutual information, to extract Chinese synonyms for the corresponding heading terms. We also develop a term-weighting mechanism. Following the hierarchical structure of CMeSH, we extend the CMeSH Tree to the eCMeSH Tree with synonymous terms and their weights. We propose an algorithm to implement CLIR using the eCMeSH Tree terms to expand queries. In order to evaluate the retrieval improvements obtained from our approach, the results of the query expansion based on the eCMeSH Tree are individually compared with the results of the experiments of query expansion using the CMeSH Tree terms, query expansion using pseudo-relevance feedback, and document translation. We also evaluate the combinations of these three approaches. This study also investigates the factors which affect the CLIR performance, including a stemming algorithm, retrieval models, and word segmentation.