Managing systematic review projects: A guide for librarians

Background: This presentation and guide will give librarians the tools they need to help corral research projects that are too large for small research teams, while maintaining adherence to review guidelines. Attendees will leave this presentation with answers to questions commonly asked by researchers regarding why and how advanced long-term review projects are performed the way that they are, and a roadmap to help guide these projects.

Description: There is a growing interest among researchers and academics to publish systematic reviews. Often researchers will set out to publish a systematic review without having previously worked with a long-term review team or having a firm grasp on what all the review process entails. Helping to guide these novice researchers and manage these types of review projects is a growing role for librarians.

The role of the librarian in these types of projects is multi-faceted, where they regularly act as facilitators, organizers, managers, voices of reason, and more. In this presentation, a guide will be provided for librarians that they can use to mentor inexperienced authors over the multi-month review process. This guide provides instruction on taking researchers through the entire review process from project organization and developing a fully formed research question to publication. This guide also discusses the stages of managing long-term review projects, as well as how to guide researchers to alternative reviews that could better suit the project. The presentation recommend specific entities for review registration, guidelines to follow, databases for literature searching, software to use in the review process, citation management programs, and places to publish, based on the generalized topic of the systematic review.

Conclusion: Measurable outcomes for this project include heightened understanding of the review process by researchers, enhanced ability to guide researchers by librarians, and overall improved collaboration and understanding of different roles played during these projects between research teams and librarians.