CORE Information Retrieval Forum (COREIRF) 2026.

ByMatt Holland

The second CORE IRF was held in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 29th January 2026,  sponsored by  the NIHR Methodology Incubator and the NIHR Innovation Observatory and hosted at Newcastle University. I presented a poster written jointly with Fiona Bell who leads the Research Institute Yorkshire Ambulance Service.  Our topic was Measuring the Impact of NHS ambulance service research activity. The implementation of BMJ Impact Analytics.1  The conference was hosted in the amazing futuristic Catalyst building.

Matt, wearing dark trousers and a grey shirt and glasses, stands in front of a poster with a green background and yellow boxes with black text.

 

Colleagues who attended were librarians, former librarians who had moved into research, researchers and academics.  Themes were Impact, the use of AI, Funding and Collaboration, CPD and Networking.  Concurrent sessions and dog walking responsibilities meant I didn’t attend all the sessions, so this is a reflection on the sessions I attended.

A black dog stands in front of a futuristic-looking black and gold building. It looks like it's been raining as the ground is wet.

OLSPub.

The keynote speaker Dr Miriam Albers from ZB Medical Library posed the question: What happens if we lose free access to PubMed?  The principle of free access to data underpins much of the work we do and many of the new AI tools are built on the back of access to PubMed.  The previously unthinkable loss of access to PubMed, ideological filtering of content or the disappearance of PubMed behind a paywall is now thinkable.  How do we respond? Dr Albers is leading  Open Life Science Publications Database (OLSPub) described as a European insurance policy against the loss of access to PubMed.  A really challenging talk that should concern us all.  OLSPub will be crowdfunding future developments in February 2026. 

The other sessions reflected the many aspects of “higher-level” searching.  Mostly I was both fascinated and in awe of the creativity and just hard work that they represented.  To give a flavour of the work these are the ones that left an impression.

Exploring the Evolution of Target Trial Emulation Through Citation Analysis.

A project that uses citation analysis to map the development of new methodologies over time using previously identified seed papers.  The project involved one step for backward citations and four iterations forward generating over 700 papers for review.  This is still a work in progress with the final aim of providing insights that may “guide researchers, funders, and policymakers in accelerating the uptake of promising research methods”.

CT-DeDupe2 is a tool written specifically to de-duplicate the results from clinical trials databases and Embase (OVID).  Available free on the web you can try it for yourself.  A creative solution to a problem that even the mighty EndNote struggles with.  Output is in .ris or CSV. 

Mobilising Knowledge: Turning Evidence into Action. 

A workshop driven almost entirely by participants working in small groups, we were taken through various tasks to help us understand how what we already do can be reframed as Knowledge Mobilisation.  As a varied group our opinions differed, a common theme though was the difficulty in defining the concept.  For my part I was re-energised to take this on again.

Two sessions specifically covered Elicit as a tool for searching for rapid reviews and guidelines.  This is clearly going to be a major area of future development.  The broad conclusion was that Elicit and to a certain extent all AI can assist where speed rather than accuracy is required. A phase that stuck with me was the need to keep a “human in the loop” for high(er) quality results.

The final Keynote focused on AI for search strategy generation and searching.  This is an area where I personally have dabbled a bit out of professional interest but haven’t had the time to fully explore.  This session was an eye opener to me in the application of AI and the number of tools already out there.  No list I can produce from my notes would do justice to this. Recommended resources are AI Search Tools and Citation Mapping Tools from Monash Health Library; also the Substack of Aaron Tay.  Broadly the message is that this is a very fast-moving area, AI tools have varying degrees of effectiveness and there is a need for further evaluation research.

Overall, a fantastic conference.  The third CORE IRF will be held next year, I would recommend colleagues to attend if you can.

Matt Holland
Library Manager
LKS ASE

References

  1. Holland, M. and Bell, F., 2025. Measuring the impact of NHS ambulance service research activity. The implementation of BMJ Impact Analytics [Poster presentation]. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12417/2149
  2. Dehdarirad, Hossein (2026). CT-DeDupe: An Automated, Free Tool for Clinical Trial Deduplication (Version 1.1.1).  https://clinicaltrialsdeduplicator.streamlit.app/ 

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