Scoping + Systematic Reviews

Who Should Be on Your Team?

As with any project, you should carefully consider who and how many people you'd like on your review team. Of course you want to include subject matter experts, but what does that mean in this context. Here are some ideas.

• People who are familiar with the topic
  Certainly you want to invite colleagues who know your topic and will be able to readily judge whether a piece of evidence should be included or not.
• People who have time
  A review is a long process that typically takes a year. You will want to invite people who are able to commit to the project for that long. If you have folks who want to participate but cannot commit to the entire timeline, you can include them for defined parts of the review, (i.e. full-text review), depending on what their availability is. 
• People with related expertise
  • Librarian - I may be biased, but I highly recommend inviting a librarian onto your team. See the next section for more details on the roles a librarian can play on a review team.
  • Statistical expert - a requirement for a meta-analysis, but probably not for any of the other review types.
  • Research methods experts - if you already know that you are going to be looking closely at the methods, possibly for quality assessment purposes or as an aspect of the data analysis, you will want to include someone who has expertise in research methods, generally, or in a particular method if that's appropriate.
• People who have access to library subscriptions
  Depending on the topic of your review, you may need access to a variety of information sources and subscriptions. If your library does not provide that access, you may want to consider collaborating with someone at an institution that does provide access.

How Big Should My Team Be?

The bare minimum you need to conduct a review is 2 people so that you can conduct the blinded screening, reviewing, and extracting. That said, a larger group will make all of those steps move faster. Many hands making light work and all of that. However, too large of a group, and the management of the project can become a burden. Ensuring understanding of the research question, testing for interrater reliability, and even just planning team meetings are all made more difficult with a larger group. 

The Role of Librarians

Librarians can a great asset on a review team. Although they are not necessarily subject matter experts as far as the topic of the review goes, they are experts on the review methods and can offer advice on the screening, reviewing, and extracting processes. 

More specifically, here are some of the functions librarians can provide.

In a consulting role (Bellack librarians are available to students, faculty, and staff in this role), librarians will assist with

• providing an introduction to the review process
• determining the scope of the review
• identifying a gap in the research
• recommending information sources (databases, etc.)
• consulting on the search strategy
• identifying software to support the review process

In a co-author role (Bellack librarians are available to only faculty and staff in this role), and in addition to the functions above, librarians will

• contribute to the review protocol
• create the search
• translate the search for other sources
• run the searches and export the results
• conduct reference searching
• write portion(s) of the manuscript

Preparing to Meet with a Librarian

If a librarian will be joining your team as a co-author, you don't need to do much to prepare, because the librarian will benefit from being in on the discussion fairly early on. 

If the librarian will be serving in a consulting role, you'll want to maximize the time you spend (not that there is a limit to the number of consultations you can request). 

For the initial meeting, it can be helpful for you to 

• Do a decent amount of searching on your topic to start getting a sense of what's out there and what sort of scope your question will have.
• Start collecting terms - as you're browsing the literature, keep a running list of the terminology you see coming up. Our Expert Keyword Searching Guide can help you begin to understand the purpose of this.
• If you are familiar with the concept of subject headings, go ahead and start identifying those as well.
• Check for other reviews on your topic. You can use keywords (e.g. AND (systematic OR scoping OR meta-analysis)) or the database limits to narrow your search to find other reviews. If you're feel adventurous, you might even try searching various protocol registries for your topic as well, in case someone has a review in the works.