Companion Guides
The following guides serve as helpful companions to this page:
About Systematic & Scoping Reviews
This guide is designed to help students, researchers at Sargent College get started with a systematic reviews, scoping review or 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.
Why Work with a Librarian?
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.
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.
