Literature Searching

Health Sciences librarians typically play one of the following roles in supporting the production of systematic reviews:

As /consultants /they either advise others on, or themselves do the following:

• Recommend and rank research databases, research and clinical trial registries, and internet search engines for their likely yield of relevant studies and documents for the research question(s).
• Develop search terms and search strategies tailored to the research question(s)
• Conduct or provide advice to the person(s) conducting the scoping search(es)
• Revise the search terms and search strategies of the initial scoping search in light of both search results and feedback from the principle investigator(s) / research team
• Keep detailed records of search results and search strategies, so that these can be documented in final review report / article

As /co-authors/** (using the ICMJE definition below) of the review, they:

• Conduct or supervise others doing the literature search as noted in the steps above
• Participate in meetings of the research team to discuss the search strategies and the implications of choosing various search strategies (ie. in terms of the relative completeness of the records retrieved, and in terms of meeting current recognized standards and benchmarks for systematic review literature searches 1, 2, 3)
• Write up the Search Strategy portion of the Methods section of the review
• Review Figure 1 of the review report for completeness and accuracy
• Review the final draft of the article for clarity and readability (as a non-content-expert reader)

**International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE): http://www.icmje.org/index.html#author