Introduction: Physician assistant (PA) students present unique challenges and opportunities for support in a health sciences academic library. This cohort often comprises of learners with diverse educational backgrounds, ranging from undergraduate to advanced degrees. In Fall 2024, the University of Manitoba physician assistant program significantly expanded, doubling its enrollment. As part of their academic journey, every student must complete a capstone project, which requires meeting with a librarian to support an in-depth literature review. To meet this growing demand and enhance the effectiveness of librarian consultations, a search template form was developed.

Description: The search template was designed as a step-by-step worksheet to provide help in developing a search in a health sciences database. The template discusses the important components of the search strategy, including concepts, keywords, controlled vocabulary, database syntax, and links to external resources at every step.

Outcomes: This tool was distributed to PA students prior to the librarian consultation to provide a structured guide for building complex searches in health sciences databases. The aim was not only to equip students with essential skills for conducting systematic searches but also to facilitate more productive consultations with librarians by creating a shared framework for discussions. With the increase in students and diminished librarian capacity, the template became instrumental to adequately supporting this program.

Discussion: In this presentation, we will share how the search template form has been integrated into our instructional and consultation practices, providing tailored support to physician assistant students as they navigate the complexities of their capstone projects.

Introduction: Though academic institutions strive to embrace Indigenous Ways of Knowing into research praxis, a true integration of Western and Indigenous values remains challenging and elusive. One manifestation of this issue is the treatment of Indigenous Knowledge sources in American Medical Association (AMA) and American Psychological Association (APA) citation styles, which are the primary citation styles used in health sciences research. Recently, there have been radical efforts by academic librarians in Canada to propose new, more inclusive templates for citing Indigenous Knowledge sources. This study seeks to evaluate this emerging practice across academic institutions in Canada to measure current practices in health sciences libraries.

Methods: Publicly available AMA, APA, and Indigenous citation guides will be identified among 297 universities and colleges in Canada. For those institutions that demonstrate one or more of these citation guides, data will be extracted to determine how many and which libraries are circumventing APA and AMA guidelines on Indigenous Knowledge source citation, and what elements they are recommending. A frequency distribution table will be created in Excel to summarize trends across institutions in Canada.

Results: Findings will be presented at the time of the conference as this research is currently in progress.

Discussion: The data will provide valuable insight into which libraries across Canada are actively decolonizing academic citation practices, how they are doing it, and what is being done among health sciences libraries. The data also has the potential to inform health science librarians’ own approach to—and recommendations for—citing Indigenous Knowledge sources.