Roles for librarians in systematic reviews: a scoping review

What roles do librarians and information professionals play in conducting systematic reviews? Librarians are increasingly called upon to be involved in systematic reviews, but no study has considered all the roles librarians can perform. This inventory of existing and emerging roles aids in defining...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the Medical Library Association 2018-01, Vol.106 (1), p.46-56
Main Authors: Spencer, Angela J, Eldredge, Jonathan D
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abstracting and Indexing
Bibliographic Databases
Evaluation
Evidence-Based Practice
Health sciences
Humans
Information professionals
Information Services
Intersectoral Collaboration
Librarians
Libraries, Medical - statistics & numerical data
Library Science
Library Services - statistics & numerical data
Medical informatics
Medical librarians
Medical libraries
Medical research
Meta-analysis
Meta-synthesis
Methods
Practice
Professional Competence
Professional Role
Professionalism
Roles
Scoping Review
Systematic review
Systematic Reviews
Systematic Reviews as Topic
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Summary:What roles do librarians and information professionals play in conducting systematic reviews? Librarians are increasingly called upon to be involved in systematic reviews, but no study has considered all the roles librarians can perform. This inventory of existing and emerging roles aids in defining librarians' systematic reviews services. For this scoping review, the authors conducted controlled vocabulary and text-word searches in the PubMed; Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts; and CINAHL databases. We separately searched for articles published in the the and We also text-word searched Medical Library Association annual meeting poster and paper abstracts. We identified 18 different roles filled by librarians and other information professionals in conducting systematic reviews from 310 different articles, book chapters, and presented papers and posters. Some roles were well known such as searching, source selection, and teaching. Other less documented roles included planning, question formulation, and peer review. We summarize these different roles and provide an accompanying bibliography of references for in-depth descriptions of these roles. Librarians play central roles in systematic review teams, including roles that go beyond searching. This scoping review should encourage librarians who are fulfilling roles that are not captured here to document their roles in journal articles and poster and paper presentations.
ISSN:1536-5050
1558-9439
DOI:10.5195/jmla.2018.82