Systematic and Other Review Articles: Help from a Librarian

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

As noted at AuthorAID workshops, librarians can greatly help researchers. By providing guidance in literature searching, they can aid in developing research and writing about it. They also can share related expertise.

Recently a librarian at my university spoke in a course I teach. This librarian is an expert on preparing systematic reviews. She discussed this topic and shared resources about it.

As you may know, systematic reviews try to answer specific questions by identifying and analyzing studies meeting specified criteria. In systematic review articles, the authors specify the methods they used. For example, they state which databases they searched, which search terms they used, and which languages and dates they included.

The librarian mentioned resources on doing systematic reviews. She especially recommended Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide. This book, which also can help with systematic reviews in other fields, is now in the AuthorAID Resource Library.

In addition, the librarian mentioned other types of review articles. These include narrative reviews (which summarize current knowledge about a subject) and meta-analyses (which combine statistical information from multiple studies). They also include scoping reviews.

Scoping reviews tend to address broader areas than systematic reviews do. However, they too entail searching literature in a systematic, explicit way.

Later the librarian sent me an article about doing scoping reviews. Although the published version of this article isn’t openly accessible, a version from the authors can be accessed.

Special thanks to librarian Margaret Foster. For more on doing systematic reviews, please see her website.

Until the next post—

Barbara