Margaret Sullivan is an assistant professor in the School of Information at Florida State University. Prior to this, she was an assistant professor at the University of Iowa. For her education, she completed a doctorate in Library and Information Science from the University of South Carolina. She also has a Master’s in Information Systems and a MLIS with a concentration in digital libraries, both from Drexel University. Her research areas of interest focus on the health-seeking behaviors and patterns of women of disadvantaged populations. Professor Zimmerman studies the impact that information access, information literacy, and reading and literacy has had in affecting the health and well-being of the women she studies. She works with large datasets and at a smaller, more personal scale. Special interest is taken in maternal health outcomes. Zimmerman’s recent research includes a comparative study between assessments of information literacy, health literacy, and the library science methodology Information Horizons Mapping, a large-scale bibliometric analysis of themes in global scholarship addressing information literacy displayed through data visualizations, and a study on the health information needs of immigrant and refugee women.
Research Interests
Health informatics, information literacy, disadvantaged populations, health literacy
Teaching Interests
Information organization, access, and retrieval across diverse populations
Publications & Research
Zimmerman, M. S. & Ni, C. (2020). What we talk about when we talk about information literacy. IFLA Journal. Forthcoming.
Zimmerman, M. S. & Rodgers, B. (2020). Exploring ways of knowing: Teaching the skill of health literacy to refugee and immigrant women. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science. Forthcoming.
Shaw, G., Zimmerman, M.S., Vasquez-Huot, L. (2020). An analytical framework to discover health information in social media data: Implications for dissemination research. Frontiers in Communication. Revised.
Zimmerman, M. S. & Beam, H. (2020). Refugee and immigrant health information needs. International Journal of Migration, Health, and Social Care, 16(2), 161-171.
Zimmerman, M. S. (2020). Information literacy as a social justice issue: Where’s the research? Journal of Information Ethics, 29(1), 45-64.
Zimmerman, M. S. & Shaw, G. (2020). Health information seeking behaviour: a concept analysis. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 37(3), 173-191.
Zimmerman, M. S. (2019). Mapping literacies: Comparing information horizons mapping to measures of information and health literacy. The Journal of Documentation, 76(2), 531-551.
Zimmerman, M. S. (2018). Information horizons mapping to assess the health literacy of refugee and immigrant women. Information Research Journal, 23(4), 963-964.
Zimmerman, M. S. (2017). Assessing the reproductive health-related information-seeking behavior of low-income women: Describing a two-step information-seeking process. The Journal of Health Communication, 23(1), p. 1-8.
Zimmerman, M. S. (2017). Reproductive health information needs and maternal literacy in the developing world: A review of the literature. IFLA journal, 43(3), 227-241.
Zimmerman, M. S. (2017). Information poverty and reproductive healthcare: Assessing the reasons for inequity between income groups. Social Work in Public Health, 32(3), 210-221.
Zimmerman, M. S. (2016). Assessing the impact on female literacy and education on maternal and infant health. International Journal of Gender Studies in Developing Societies, 1(4), 365–375.