Systematic Reviews for the Health Sciences: Librarian Support

• Bunn, M., Zolman, N., Smith, C. P., Khanna, D., Hanneke, R., Betancourt, T. S., & Weine, S., (2022). Family-based mental health interventions for refugees across the migration continuum: A systematic review. SSM - Mental Health, 2, 100153.
• Byrne, C. A., McNeil, A. T., Koh, T. J., Brunskill, A. F., & Fantuzzi, G. (2019). Expression of genes in the skeletal muscle of individuals with cachexia/sarcopenia: A systematic review. PloS one, 14(9), e0222345.
• Kohn, T. P., Ohlander, S. J., Jacob, J. S., Griffin, T. M., Lipshultz, L. I., & Pastuszak, A. W. (2018). The effect of subclinical varicocele on pregnancy rates and semen parameters: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Current Urology Reports,
  19(7), 1-10.
• Park, S., Kim, H., Jang, M. K., Kim, H., Raszewski, R., & Doorenbos, A. Z. (2022). Community-based death preparation and education: A scoping review. Death Studies, 1-10.

UIC Librarians can help you get started on a search strategy for your systematic review, scoping review, or other evidence synthesis project.

If you are a student conducting a review as course-related work, please ask your instructor to contact the appropriate subject librarian to arrange a meeting.

Tier 1: Consultation services for systematic reviews and other evidence syntheses

Your subject librarian, or another librarian who specializes in review methods, is available to consult with your team, meeting 1-3 times to advise on the following aspects of your review:

• Refer to best practices literature for guidance through the review process
• Design search strategy in broad strokes: e.g., which databases to search, not including individual search term selection or search string development 
• Train team members on advanced database searching 
• Consultation on citation management applications (RefWorks, Zotero, EndNote)

The Tier 1 services outlined above are available to all UIC faculty, students, and other affiliated researchers. In these cases, your librarian appreciates a mention in the Acknowledgements section of your final publication.

Schedule a meeting with a librarian to discuss Tier 1 service for your review.

Tier 2: Collaboration as co-author

Depending on availability, a librarian may be able to collaborate on your review. When participating at this more involved level of service, librarians fulfill the ICMJE criteria for authorship and therefore would be listed as a co-author on any resulting publications.

As there are many reviews completed annually at UIC, unfortunately we cannot always fulfill requests for co-authorship. In cases where a librarian is available to collaborate as a co-author, in addition to the above-described services, the librarian will provide some negotiated selection of the following:

• Define research question and translate into keywords/search string
• Develop search strategy and document for protocol registration (e.g. PROSPERO)
• Develop and execute search strategy in scholarly databases and grey literature sources
• Save references and remove duplicates from search results
• Upload references to Covidence or your preferred tool
• Advise on backwards and forwards citation search (cited and citing references) 
• Locate literature to inform methodology/protocol, quality assessment, other parts of review process 
• Document search strategy and draft relevant portion of methods section for final manuscript(s)
• Advise on data management process
• Rerun search for review update 

UIC Librarians do not provide assistance with the following aspects of the review process:

• Meta-analysis
• Project management
• Supervising or delegating work to student workers or research assistants
• Retrieving full text articles
• Screening citations for inclusion/exclusion

If you are interested in collaborating with a librarian as a co-author, please fill out this form so that we can learn more about your review and determine whether a librarian is available to work with you on it.