Why every scientist needs a librarian – Nature

CAREER FEATURE
23 February 2026

Why every scientist needs a librarian

Librarians can be key research partners who help to scour the
literature, manage data and make science open.

By Amber Dance

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 librarians

But 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 overload

For 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 partners

Pawliuk 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.

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