Are you looking to write a systematic review? Librarians can support this in a variety of ways, and we've put together a guide outlining how we can help and how you can make the most of the service. For example, we can help with:
- Carrying out scoping searches to check how much literature is available and check for existing systematic reviews on your topic that might duplicate your work
- Providing advice on suitable databases to search
- Designing search strategies to retrieve any relevant articles
- Providing details of search strategies and numbers of results to enable completion of the PRISMA flow chart
- Provide advice on appropriate search filters if your search is looking for a particular study design or population
- Providing lists of references in your chosen format (for example, RIS)
- Providing access to a RefWorks account if you don’t have access to reference management software
Involving librarians in the systematic review process has been shown to produce significantly higher quality reported search strategies. Having librarians assisting in formulating search strategies and performing literature searches across multiple databases helps researchers minimise bias in their reviews.
