Systematic Review & Scoping Review Support in the Health Sciences

This guide is designed to help students, researchers at Sargent College get started with systematic reviews, scoping reviews or a similar types of evidence synthesis.

• Systematic reviews: synthesize literature that meets pre-specified criteria to answer a specific clinical question. Authors of systematic reviews seek to minimize bias by using explicit, reproducible search strategies.
• Scoping Reviews: map out the existing literature on a topic by using explicit, reproducible search strategies.

Several recent journal articles highlight the advantages of working with a librarian when preparing to write a systematic review. These include:

• Dudden, R., & Protzkol, S. (2011). The Systematic review team: Contributions  of the health sciences librarian. Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 30(3), 301-315.
• Rethlefsen, M., Murad, M., & Livingston, E. (2014). Engaging medical librarians to improve the quality of review articles. JAMA, 312(10), 999.
• Rethlefsen, Farrell, Osterhaus Trzasko, & Brigham. (2015). Librarian co-authors correlated with higher quality reported search strategies in general internal medicine systematic reviews. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 68(6), 617-626.
• Spencer, A. J., & Eldredge, J. D. (2018). Roles for librarians in systematic reviews: a scoping review. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 106(1), 46.

I look forward to working with you on your systematic review or scoping review. I am available to help with several steps of the process.