A Review of Critical Thinking Training in Librarianship, Knowledge, and Information Science

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Extended Abstract
Background Critical thinking is an essential cognitive process for developing and using knowledge. It can be used to solve problems and make decisions in social, clinical, ethical, managerial, or political fields. Since critical thinking is useful in analyzing complex data, evaluating situations and actions, and implementing the most appropriate actions, it is recognized as an essential need for problem solving and effective decision making in all stages of life. Lack of critical thinking, in addition to harming personal and social life, can also harm professional life. Every day, librarians face a complex challenge in searching, retrieving, and selecting through vast sources of information to meet users' very specific information needs. Considering the priority of evaluation in all the mentioned roles of librarians, the best skill that information professionals can develop in this field to prepare for such challenges is to acquire the basic skill of critical thinking. The necessity of developing critical thinking for university librarians, whose main mission is to meet the information needs of the scientific community, can have a key and effective role in improving the level of knowledge and scientific development of a country. Thus, it is essential to conduct targeted research to determine the role of critical thinking in librarians and foster this type of thinking in them. The results of such research, while specifying the levels of benefit of librarians from the five critical thinking skills, reveal the areas that need more effort for training critical thinking in librarians. This study intends to examine the research done in the field of teaching critical thinking in librarianship and identify its sub-branches.
Methods
To achieve the objectives of the study and attain a comprehensive understanding of it, this study was conducted as a narrative review. To collect data, Medline (PubMed), Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Scopus, Magiran, Islamic Science Citation (ISC), and Dissertations databases by ProQuest were searched. Google Scholar was also used for citation tracking combination of natural language keywords, along with controlled vocabulary of MeSH treasures. To search the literature, the terms “critical thinking”; “thinking”; “education”; “curriculum”, “teaching”; “librarianship”; “library and information science”; “medical library and information science”; and “knowledge and information science” were utilized. Boolean operators and truncation technique were used for combining key terms and building search syntaxes. The search was not limited to any date, language, or field. The only inclusion criterion was addressing critical thinking in educational aspects of the library science field, such as teaching, development, and assessment of the curriculum. Articles that described the state of critical thinking of students or graduates without any intervention were excluded from the study. First, the search results were screened by title. After removing irrelevant and duplicate articles, full-text assessment was done.
Results
Our search strategy resulted in the retrieval of a total of 439 articles. After the initial review of the titles and abstracts of the articles and removing irrelevant and repetitive articles, 67 articles entered the evaluation stage. After reviewing the full texts, 32 articles were eligible to enter the research. In this way, the obtained studies were first evaluated in terms of the relevance of the title and abstract. The related studies were selected for further review and the full texts of the extracted articles were reviewed. Based on the review of the literature, the literature in the field of librarianship related to critical thinking were divided into four main categories: 1) the importance and evaluation of critical thinking in library science, 2) the role of librarians in education and promotion of CT, 3) the necessity to consider critical thinking in curriculum of LIS and 4) the methods and approached used in library science education for promotion of CT.
Conclusion
This study examined the published articles on the importance of teaching critical thinking through curricula with the help of different approaches and strategies. Our results can increase the awareness of managers and those involved in library education to adopt appropriate measures to change and modify the structures and programs. Also, the areas mentioned in this study can be used for further investigations.