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Systematic Reviews & Other Syntheses

Welcome!

The purpose of this guide is to connect you with useful information and resources for embarking on a systematic review or other type of synthesis. 

Librarian involvement in systematic reviews is a practice recommendation by the Institute of Medicine and leading sources of evidence-based information including Cochrane and JBI. 

Research has shown that librarian involvement in systematic reviews increases the quality of search strategies (Koffel, 2015) and reporting (Meert et al., 2016; Rethlefsen et al., 2015).

There is a separate research guide for conducting traditional literature reviews.

Tasks to Complete Before Meeting with a Librarian

Before the first consultation with a librarian, you will be asked to complete and provide the following (please provide at least one (1) weekday beforehand):

Librarian Support for Syntheses

Librarians offer a two-tiered service for Queen’s University faculty, staff, and students conducting knowledge syntheses. Advisory consultation is available to all faculty, staff and students. Additionally, collaboration may be available to research teams that include at least one faculty member, at the discretion of the librarian.

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

Library Statement Regarding Undergraduate Students

For syntheses undertaken by undergraduate students as part of course work or independent research, the Queen’s University faculty supervisor (or Principal Investigator) must attend the initial meeting with a librarian. This meeting will be used to discuss and decide on best practices for the review to ensure student success in the completion of the project.  

Undergraduate students should contact their liaison librarian directly to schedule consultations:

Note: Other students may book with any health sciences librarian using our online system, but must also schedule the first meeting with their faculty advisor/PI.

 

Syntheses as Course Assignments

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 (Borah, 2017). 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.

Advisory Consultation

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). 
  • Librarians will meet with review members/teams in an advisory capacity for no more than five (5) total hours.
  • Faculty supervisors should give methodological guidance to students before meeting with a librarian to begin 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:

Collaboration

Please note: 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 guidelines where collaboration shall include authorship.

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.
  • 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: 

 Is the review being conducted under the auspices of a systematic review collaboration (i.e. Cochrane, JBI, Campbell)?

 Has the same review already been published recently?

 Can the researcher(s) clearly describe the research question?

 Has the researcher(s) established inclusion and exclusion criteria?

 Does the research question seem manageable in scope (not likely to yield too many eligible studies)?

 Does the research question seem worthwhile (not likely to yield no or too few eligible studies)?

 Does the review type match the research purpose?

 Can the researcher(s) clearly describe the rationale and planned methods of the review?

 Has a protocol been prepared? Will it be registered (e.g. PROSPERO) or published?

 Does the review team plan to follow best practice standards for conducting and reporting reviews such as PRISMA?

 Does the review team agree to a comprehensive search approach (i.e. searching all key databases, employing comprehensive search strategies etc.)?

 Will the screening process involve the decision of two screeners for each item reviewed (at the citation/abstract level and full-text level)?

 Does the research project seem manageable for the number of review team members?

 Are the review timelines realistic and feasible?

Bibliography

Higgins, J.P.T. & Green, S. (Eds.). (2011). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions Version 5.1.0 [updated March 2011]. The Cochrane Collaboration. Available from www.handbook.cochrane.org.

Institute of Medicine. (2011). Finding what works in health care: standards for systematic reviews. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Koffel, J. B. (2015). Use of recommended search strategies in systematic reviews and the impact of librarian involvement: A cross-sectional survey of recent authors. PLoS ONE, 10(5), 1–13.

McGowan, J., & Sampson, M. (2005). Systematic reviews need systematic searchers. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 93(1), 74.
 
McGowan, J., Sampson, M., Salzwedel, D. M., Cogo, E., Foerster, V., & Lefebvre, C. (2016). PRESS peer review of electronic search strategies: 2015 guideline statementJournal of clinical epidemiology75, 40-46.

Meert, D., Torabi, N., & Costella, J. (2016). Impact of librarians on reporting of the literature searching component of pediatric systematic reviews. Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 104(4), 267–277.

Peters, M. D., Godfrey, C. M., Khalil, H., McInerney, P., Parker, D., & Soares, C. B. (2015). Guidance for conducting systematic scoping reviews. International journal of evidence-based healthcare, 13(3), 141-146.

Peters, M. D, Godfrey, C. M., McInerney, P., Soares, C., Hanan, K., & Parker, D. (2015). The Joanna Briggs Institute Reviewers' Manual 2015: Methodology for JBI Scoping Reviews

Rethlefsen, M. L., Farrell, A. M., Osterhaus Trzasko, L. C., & Brigham, T. J. (2015). Librarian co-authors correlated with higher quality reported search strategies in general internal medicine systematic reviews. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 68(6), 617–626. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2014.11.025