Public engagement is increasingly viewed as an important pillar of scientific scholarship. For early career and established scholars, however, navigating the mosaic landscape of public education and science communication, noted for rapid “ecological” succession, can be daunting. Moreover, academics are characterized by diverse skills, motivations, values, positionalities, and temperaments that may differentially incline individuals to particular public translation activities.

‘Describing at Large Their True and Lively Figure, their several Names, Conditions, Kinds, Virtues (both Natural and Fanciful), Countries of their Species, their Love and Hatred to Humankind, and the wonderful work of Natural Selection in their Evolution, Preservation, and Destruction.

Interwoven with curious variety of Creative Narrations out of Academic Literatures, Scholars, Artists, Scientists, and Poets. Illustrated with diverse Graphics and Emblems both pleasant and profitable for Students of all Faculties and Professions.’

‘Describing at Large Their True and Lively Figure, their several Names, Conditions, Kinds, Virtues (both Natural and Fanciful), Countries of their Species, their Love and Hatred to Humankind, and the wonderful work of Natural Selection in their Evolution, Preservation, and Destruction.

Interwoven with curious variety of Creative Narrations out of Academic Literatures, Scholars, Artists, Scientists, and Poets. Illustrated with diverse Graphics and Emblems both pleasant and profitable for Students of all Faculties and Professions.’

This item includes:

1) The official bracket files for the 2022 MMM tournament

2) A screen-reader enabled bracket file

3) 2022 March Mammal Madness Educational Materials Packet – in English

4) 2022 March Mammal Madness Educational Materials Packet – in Spanish

5) March Mammal Madness, Middle School Lesson Plan : Ecosystems & National Parks

6) March Mammal Madness, High School Lesson Plan : Ecosystems & National Parks 

Since 2018, MMM team members have written sport-style summaries following the live "play-by-play" narration of simulated combatant encounters on social media. These summaries, highlighting key adaptations, human impacts, and other scholarly information, have been provided to educators to describe tournament outcomes to their learners who do not follow the battle narrations "live" on social media.

March Mammal Madness is a science outreach project that, over the course of several weeks in March, reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. We combine four approaches to science outreach – gamification, social media platforms, community event(s), and creative products – to run a simulated tournament in which 64 animals compete to become the tournament champion. While the encounters between the animals are hypothetical, the outcomes rely on empirical evidence from the scientific literature. Players select their favored combatants beforehand, and during the tournament scientists translate the academic literature into gripping “play-by-play” narration on social media. To date ~1100 scholarly works, covering almost 400 taxa, have been transformed into science stories. March Mammal Madness is most typically used by high-school educators teaching life sciences, and we estimate that our materials reached ~1% of high-school students in the United States in 2019. Here we document the intentional design, public engagement, and magnitude of reach of the project. We further explain how human psychological and cognitive adaptations for shared experiences, social learning, narrative, and imagery contribute to the widespread use of March Mammal Madness.

This packet includes:

 2021 Bracket Common Name 

2021 Bracket Latin Binomial 

Bracket FAQ (English) 

Pre-Tournament Research Lesson Plan (English) 

Tournament Lesson Plan & Worksheets (English) 

Visual Arts Lesson Plan (English) 

Language Arts Lesson Plan (English) 

Guide for Youngest Players (English)

JUMBO Bracket for Youngest Players (English)

2021 Bracket Common Name (Spanish) 

Pre-Tournament Research Lesson Plan (Spanish) 

Tournament Lesson Plan & Worksheets (Spanish) 

Visual Arts Lesson Plan (Spanish)

Language Arts Lesson Plan (Spanish) 

JUMBO Bracket for Youngest Players (Spanish) 

Objectives: This pilot study analyzes citation patterns of international health (IH) research. The authors hypothesize that researchers use journal articles more than other resources as other public health literature mapping projects have shown. This study's objective is to identify key journals in IH and unique or common citation patterns in IH in comparison to areas like infectious disease or environmental health.

Methods: The authors selected research articles published in January 2013 issues of four IH journals: Bulletin of the World Health Organization (BWHO), Health Policy and Planning (HPP), Lancet Infectious Diseases (LID), and the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition (JHPN). The criteria for journal selection were based on Core Public Health Journals Project version 2.0, Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and Scopus. Data were collected by compiling all citations used by research articles. In addition to journals, books, and other published sources, this study identifies cited sources of gray literature in IH and the extent to which Internet sources are used in formal IH research. With open data trends in mind, this study looks for the citation of data sets.

Results: Out of 1,246 total citations, 817 (66%) were journal articles, 210 (17%) were miscellaneous, 205 (16%) were books/monographs, and 14 (1%) were government documents. The most highly cited journal titles were Lancet (86 citations) and BWHO (33 citations). Two journals that the authors expected to have high citations, but did not, were Lancet: Infectious Disease and American Journal of Public Health. The poster will also include:

1. Cited journals by subject.
2. Publication date of citations.
3. Examination of the miscellaneous category for data set citations.

Conclusions: Journal articles remain the most highly cited source type for public health research, seconded by gray literature and web resources; then monographs and United States government documents. Gray literature and web resources represent information provided by governments throughout the world, including 5 examples of government data sets. Compared to previous public health journal studies with journal article citation close to 90%, this study shows a lower percentage of journal articles (66%) relative to other source types. While recent articles are cited most, cited journal articles greatly range in age at citation. This study also showed lower citations of typically highly cited public health journal titles and major medical journals. There is a need for older journals. Librarians may want to focus on clinical journals that are relevant to their programs. Citation of data sets does not seem common yet, but this is something to monitor regarding public health data sources. Future studies could look at whether availability of global online government sources and online translation tools may be resulting in greater use of multiple language sources.