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March 2020 signaled school closures and moves online for many institutions, but an online EdD program at a midsize, Christian university featured fewer than-expected programmatic changes. Because of its modality, program operations continued with relatively few changes. Although COVID-19-related campus closures did not interrupt these students’ scheduled courses, they substantively impacted their personal and professional lives. As a result, the authors in the program-specific writing center serving these students found themselves helping them navigate not only stresses related to the already-strenuous task of writing a dissertation but also personal and professional anxieties related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study is to explore and reflect on the strategies employed by a program‐specific writing center to support doctoral students during the COVID‐19 pandemic, focusing on relaxed scheduling policies, emotional support beyond writing, and fostering deeper interpersonal connections to address the unique challenges students faced during this period.

The authors conducted an autoethnographic exploration of their experiences to consider and examine effective strategies for supporting students in times of stress. The authors guided this inquiry by reviewing logs, notes and video recordings of sessions held or rescheduled in Spring 2020.

The authors identified three major themes in how they adjusted their approach to considering the pandemic: relaxed scheduling policies, emotional support beyond the writing process by permitting students to set the writing aside while they focused on the more immediate concerns emerging from the rapid onset of pandemic life and intentionally using the opportunity to form deeper interpersonal connections with students in their home environments.

As institutions reflect on lessons learned during pandemic stresses, closures and mandates, intentional exploration and reflection allow for a greater understanding of what improvements the authors can make to future practice. This uniquely positioned study offers a valuable perspective on supporting students through crisis.

Gamification is an emerging technique of applying game elements to difficult and tedious learning activities to make them fun and exciting. This study aims to review the scientific landscape of the library’s readiness to adopt gamification with context to application in teaching and learning purposes based on computational tools. The present research also aims to study the growth of literature on gamification, to identify the most contributing authors, countries, affiliations and journals and collaboration status with different geographical settings. The study will also identify the most influential paper on the area with the highest citation and Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) as well as analyzing the keywords for locating the research trend in the subject area.

The study has adopted Scientometric and Altmetric approach by considering the research outputs of a decade (2013–2022) from Scopus database. First, the required data has been searched using appropriate keywords forming the search strategy by running title–abstract–keywords considering the limitation in the system. The exported data is systematically visualized for performing science mapping like the collaboration of authors, countries, organizations and co-occurrence of keywords using VOSviewer. For finding the Altmetrics score and Mendeley readership of the influential research works, the system Dimension.ai is further used.

The study found 928 records indicating an exponential growth over the years with total 2,750 authors. Samuel Kai Wah Chu from the University of Hong Kong, China, is the most contributed author. Spain and the USA are highly productive countries, but there needs to be a strong collaboration pattern among authors. It is found that gamification is widely applied in education discipline than any other. Some of the libraries have already implemented gamification tools for learning purposes in their services. The research on gamification still lacks social media attention and needs to be promoted more through various social media platforms for greater visibility.

The study explores the global scientific literature to identify the library’s awareness of implementing gamification tools in their services for teaching and learning purposes. As per the author’s knowledge, no such study has been conducted until date with such aims and objectives through the application of both Scientometrics and Altmetrics approaches.