Systematic Reviews in the Health Sciences

This guide is geared towards students and faculty members at BU's Sargent College on the Charles River Campus. If you are a student on the Medical Campus, I recommend contacting the librarians at the Alumni Medical Library for one-on-one assistance with your systematic review.

Preparing and writing a systematic review involves careful planning and several steps. I am available to help you throughout the process and am eager to help with any or all of the following steps:

• Identifying existing systematic reviews related to your research question. 
• Selecting appropriate journal databases for your topic.
• Devising a database search strategy. This includes: identifying keywords/MESH headings, creating a search string, applying search filters and performing databases searches.
• Help finding the full-text of articles and other documents.
• Searching for grey literature on your topic.
• Keeping a record of the search strategies for the methodology section of your systematic review.
• Assessing the influence of a particular author or paper.
• Managing the search results by saving them in a citation management software such as Zotero or RefWorks.

   

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.