Meet the Team: Mick Arber

Mick Arber

Senior Information Specialist, YHEC

Interested to find out more about what it's like to work at YHEC? Or maybe you have an interest in the information field and are wondering what a career in this area is like? In this blog we interview Mick Arber, a Senior Information Specialist at YHEC. We find out how he got into this role, what his day-to-day work looks like, and what he enjoys most about being part of YHEC.

What is your name, role and workstream?
My name is Mick Arber. I'm a Senior Information Specialist working in the Information Specialist team. We're a cross-company resource and work with all of the workstreams in YHEC.

Tell us about your qualifications and career path up until this point.
My first degree was in English Literature, followed by a teaching qualification.

In the late 1990s I began working in the information field, starting out in a public library. I really enjoyed identifying service user information needs and finding ways to meet those needs. Developments in technology made it a really interesting time to work in the information sector: the internet was still evolving - most people didn't have internet in their homes and libraries were just introducing it as a service. Suddenly, when people came in looking for information, we had this thing called the internet that we could use. It was an exciting time to be starting out in the field.

In 2000, I took a job working as an information assistant in a busy healthcare information service that supported several NHS trusts and a large medical school. This role was the start of my work in the area of health information. Again, it happened to be a really key time to work in the field. There was a big drive towards evidence-based practice in health care, and effective and efficient identification of information was fundamental to that.

I was given opportunities to work in different areas of the service and one of these was literature searching, which I really enjoyed. I took a master's in information management and then applied for a job as a clinical effectiveness librarian at the service. The role brought me into contact with the Cochrane Airways Group, which was based at the hospital, and I started working with a colleague there to increase uptake of evidence-based information across the trust: this showed me the key role that information specialists could play in evidence-based practice.

In 2003, I took the role of Information Specialist at the BMJ Publishing Group. The group published a number of products, one of which was BMJ Clinical Evidence – a resource that aimed to provide clinicians with summaries of the best available evidence on questions most relevant to clinical practice. My role was to conduct the searches and result assessment that underpinned this resource (and, down the line, other BMJ resources).

In 2012 I joined YHEC as an Information Specialist. One of the attractions was the chance to work with Julie Glanville, who led the review team at that time and is highly respected in the health information field. Julie has championed robust methods throughout her career, and YHEC has always seen information specialists as a core part of the evidence synthesis team. Initially, I was the only person in this role, but I was very shortly joined by another and then, a few years later, I moved into a senior role. 

Tell us more about your role and where it sits within YHEC.
I now work closely with two other information specialists. We are all really experienced: we have each worked for over 20 years in the health information field. Information retrieval in the context of evidence synthesis is a highly specialised skillset. Expertise is needed to ensure the synthesis is appropriately robust, efficient and timely - information specialists are the team members who bring this specific expertise. Having experienced information specialists as a core, integral part of the review team aligns with recommendations on methods published elsewhere – for example by Cochrane. I feel YHEC’s understanding of review methods and commitment to appropriate quality and efficiency is something that makes us stand out as a research consultancy.

The information specialists are a cross-company resource, working with all teams, but most frequently with the Review and Evidence Synthesis (RES) team. My core role is to provide support for a range of different review types, from systematic reviews to much more highly pragmatic reviews, and I contribute in a range of ways. These include, for example, helping to determine project scope, methods and budget, populating the protocol, designing and running the searches, and writing the report. Additional aspects of my role include providing information specialist expertise to external clients conducting their own reviews, peer-reviewing my colleagues’ work, developing and maintaining process documents, finding appropriate journal options for teams aiming to publish, and helping to produce a horizon scanning bulletin for the company. I’m also a member of the YHEC Mental Health Wellbeing Group.

Tell us more about the impact of your work.
The information specialist work has a key impact on review robustness and project efficiency. In an evidence synthesis, the aim is to identify, review, summarise and base conclusions on the available evidence. The search is the foundation for this: if we don’t identify the available evidence, the review conclusions may not be valid. At the same time, we need to make sure our methods are appropriately efficient; the time we spend on searches and the number of results we retrieve for screening can have a really significant impact on project budget and timelines. For much more pragmatic reviews, again, by getting the degree of pragmatism right, our work enables the team to produce a review that delivers what is required. Our work often informs guidance and advice published by public bodies, feeds into work conducted by pharmaceutical companies, device companies and charities and is published in peer-reviewed journals. The impact of our work can therefore be wide-ranging - the reviews we work on can influence healthcare decisions by clinicians, patients and carers and may have repercussions for healthcare systems. By making sure we get the foundations for these reviews right, our work has a really important and positive impact.

What do you love most about your role?
There's lots of things! Most especially, the work is always really varied. We work on all kinds of reviews, on all kinds of topics, for many different types of clients, so the context of every review is always different.

The challenges you meet for each review are different each time and, usually, there's no single correct way to meet that challenge. What we're always trying to achieve is the sweet spot, the balance of robustness and efficiency that is appropriate to the particular project. Finding ways to do that is not always easy, but it's always interesting. I enjoy how the role brings various elements together: we need a really good technical understanding of literature searching, but we also need to be flexible, responsive and creative. We also need to be good communicators; there are different trade-offs at play - we have to make sure that the wider research team understands those trade-offs. I also really enjoy being part of a review team, all pulling together.

What are your favourite types of projects to work on, and why? Or perhaps you have favourite methods?
I like projects that are not super-straightforward – the ones where, at the beginning, it’s all a bit of a puzzle, an unknown, and we approach it like detectives. The concepts might be woolly, you’re not sure how relevant literature will be described in database records, how challenging it will be to find that evidence, what search structure to use, what the screening numbers context will be, and how much of a problem those numbers might present to the search. I like those projects where the search process starts off from this uncertain beginning, and then you move forward until at the end you have a coherent, effective, appropriate search approach.

What do you enjoy most about working at YHEC?
Apart from the actual work, I would say there are two key things. Firstly, YHEC has a really good balance about it. For example, we work for the private sector and the public sector; we need to be robust but also efficient; and sometimes we work for a company submitting to NICE or we work for NICE assessing company submissions. We have a commercial side, but staff wellbeing is really important. It just seems like a nice balance. The other things I really enjoy are the people and the culture. It’s a really friendly, supportive and appreciative culture and helps make YHEC a great company to work for.

What does a typical day look like for you?
There doesn’t tend to be a ‘typical’ day. I’m usually working on several projects at the same time, and they will all be at different stages so what I’m doing will depend on what stage they are at.

Across the day I’ll often be feeding into a number of projects in different ways. For example, my work might involve meeting prospective clients to scope reviews, communicating with reviewers on draft eligibility, running scoping searches to estimate timelines and resources, costing information specialist input, developing search strategies and populating methods, executing database searches and downloading records, populating report search sections, or peer reviewing colleagues' work. The makeup of each day will depend on what the workflow is like at that time.

What areas of research are most interesting to you?
I’m interested in methods research around search robustness and efficiency. We have lots of decision points and judgement calls – points where we could go one way or another. This might relate to, for example, choice of search structure, terms, syntax or resources. I’m interested in research that helps inform our decisions so that we can be appropriately robust but also as efficient as possible. There’s an active community of information specialists who are involved in producing and summarising research on search methods. This is also an area we have published in. YHEC supports the information specialist team with their participation in methods research, meaning that we can get involved in producing high-quality methods and investigating innovative approaches.

How do you see work in your field developing in the future?
In the evidence synthesis field, a big challenge is how resource-intensive the production of these kinds of reviews is. This is partly due to the sheer quantity of research being published – increasing all the time – but also, I think, because the type and range of research questions that evidence syntheses are being used to answer are less focused and more complex than they were previously.

How the research community meets this challenge will impact on our work. It could be, for example, that there is an increased focus on pragmatism in review methods, with the trade-offs accepted. Or it might be that developments in technology enable reviewers to do more for less. Artificial intelligence (AI) is obviously something on everyone’s horizon. In relation to information specialist work, AI could impact the search process itself, potentially helping us to develop or conduct searches more robustly and/or quickly. It could also impact the search by reducing the human screening burden: if AI can screen results appropriately, this may mean there is less need for the information specialist to spend time refining the search to reduce the number of records. AI could also take the information specialist role off in different directions. The Information Specialist Team have already been investigating where AI might add value to our work. In many ways, we’re well placed to become further involved as technology develops because we’ve always worked at that intersection between words, information and technology.

What’s your favourite thing to do outside of work?
I like to walk in the hills, that's what I like to do - like a lot of people.

Tell us a surprising or fun fact about you.
A fun fact: I used to be able to throw a peanut or sweet really, really high in the air and then catch it in my mouth. But I don't do it anymore - too cautious now, too aware of the risk of getting said peanut trapped somewhere or chipping a tooth as it came down. So in my foolish, carefree youth I could do that, but no one will ever know whether I'm telling the truth about how good I was, because I don't do it anymore. I used to be pretty good at it though!