Systematic Reviews & Other Syntheses

For students to meet with a librarian, you must provide the following materials at least 24 hours or 1 business day in advance:

• Complete and return the Knowledge Synthesis Work Plan document or share your protocol (a draft is acceptable but the research question and eligibility criteria must be finalized).

• Your Work Plan should include a preliminary search strategy in Ovid MEDLINE or Ovid Embase (PubMed will not be accepted), and 3-5 key studies that meet your eligibility criteria.

• Complete the Synthesis Labyrinth: Racing the Outbreak escape room or the basic Syntheses Knowledge Check version and include the code in your Work Plan. (This only needs to be completed one-time.)

Be sure to review this guide and the training modules (particularly, Module 3: Searching for Eligible Studies) and check out our new Systematic and Scoping Reviews Workshop Series for interactive learning!

Librarians provide advisory consultations to all Queen’s University faculty, staff, and students conducting syntheses. 

To meet with a librarian about support for your knowledge synthesis, please book a consultation using our online booking system.

Important notes:

• It is out of scope for librarians to:
  • Provide step-by-step guidance on how to conduct knowledge syntheses. 
  • Provide guidance on statistical analysis for meta-analyses.
  • Interpret assignment instructions for students or review their assignment outputs (outside of search strategies). 
  • Construct research questions and determine eligibility criteria​.
• Faculty supervisors should give methodological guidance to students before meeting with a librarian to develop the search.
• If you would like to name the librarian who provided support for your review in an acknowledgement or the search methods, please discuss with the librarian first.
   

Librarians will advise on how to:

• Determine the scope of the project (i.e. is the question suitable for a knowledge synthesis).
• Determine if a review or protocol on the same topic already exists.
• Determine appropriate databases/resources to search.
• Develop a comprehensive search strategy including translation across databases.
• Perform a search update.
• Conduct grey literature searches.
• Conduct supplemental search methods for locating studies (hand-searching, searching reference lists and cited reference searching).
• Report search methods according to PRISMA-Search.

Collaboration with review teams that include faculty members is provided at the discretion of the librarian based on their availability and the review quality considerations in the table below. Librarians follow ICMJE author guidelines where collaboration shall include authorship.

To meet with a librarian about support for your knowledge synthesis, please book a consultation using our online booking system.

As a co-author, a librarian may agree to do the following:

• Determine if a synthesis or protocol on the topic already exists.
• Write or review the search methods for the protocol.
• Develop and execute database/resource-specific search strategies.
• Engage in Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) to enhance search accuracy, comprehensiveness, and quality.
• Rerun searches at a later date, when appropriate [8].
• Import search results into Covidence review software.
• Advise/assist with search methods for locating grey literature.
• Write the search methods according to PRISMA-Search.
   

Review characteristics for librarian collaboration consideration: 

Systematic and scoping reviews are a type of literature review with a transparent, rigorous and reproducible methodology. Synthesis research intended for publication will benefit from having a full team of experts including but not limited to methodologists, subject experts, librarians, and statisticians and take an average of 1.25 years to complete [9]. 

As such, there are exercises that can be incorporated into assignments to better equip students to undertake evidence syntheses in their future studies/work without the time and resource constraints of a full review. Please contact a librarian for assistance in drafting evidence synthesis assignments.