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Systematic Reviews

Statement of Services

The librarians at the McGoogan Library can help you determine if a systematic review is the appropriate kind of literature review for your research question. A full description of our systematic review services is below.

Registry-Related Services

When asked, librarians will:

  1. search systematic review registries to see if others are already working on your topic.
  2. provide links to systematic review registry websites so that you can register your planned systematic review.
  3. assist you with registering your planned systematic review protocol with a systematic review registry (PROSPERO, Open Science Framework, JBI, etc.) on which the librarian is an author.
    1. Librarians will not peer review a protocol if they are not on the systematic or scoping review project team.
    2. Librarians are available to discuss best practices on creating and registering protocols.

Searching Services

  1. Perform an initial thorough search of the relevant, literature databases available at UNMC. A thorough search requires intermittent search work over the course of a few days to a week and is a good basis for an exhaustive search but is not, itself, an exhaustive search.    
  2. Describe the steps that may be needed to produce an exhaustive search from the initial thorough search.
  3. Develop appropriate search strategies for each database to be used for this search.
  4. Perform a comprehensive/exhaustive search of the relevant literature databases. An exhaustive search requires repeated review of search results, term harvesting, search revision, and re-searching and may take a month or more of intermittent work.
  5. Update search results. A librarian's ability to help with a literature search update will depend on who performed the initial search, whether the search strategies were well documented, when the update is requested, what type of update is needed and what time is available to perform the update.

Documentation Services

  1. Provide a document containing the search strategies, dates of searches, number of results retrieved from each database, and the number of duplicates removed from the search results as a whole.
  2. Write a narrative description of the database search strategies for the methods section of your article.

Grey Literature Search Services

When asked, librarians will search selected, grey literature resources and/or Google Scholar.

Storage and De-duplication of Search results

  1. Import search results into Zotero or EndNote.
  2. Provide a folder or library of de-duplicated records.
  3. Provide instructions on using Zotero or EndNote to manage your records.

Obtaining Full-Text Articles

  1. Teach the steps to obtain full-text journal articles.

McGoogan Library librarians will not:

  1. Perform manual searches of journal tables of contents or article bibliographies.
  2. Call outside investigators who are completing studies on your topic.
  3. Pay inter-library loan costs.
  4. Pay fees for searching databases not available through our library.
  5. Pay for bibliographic management software not licensed by the library or UNMC.
  6. Perform reruns of searches performed by other librarians or information professionals. Systematic searches performed by librarians are considered scholarly work; as such, the librarian who performed the initial search should be consulted for any updates or reruns.
    1.  If that librarian is no longer performing scoping or systematic reviews, the researcher may ask McGoogan librarians to perform new systematic or scoping review searches according to the researcher’s criteria. This will require a research consultation to begin the search process anew.  

If an investigator would prefer to not include a librarian as an author on a systematic or scoping review, librarians will not perform the needed searches. Librarians will be happy to advise on the steps usually taken when creating an exhaustive search strategy but will not edit or provide a peer review of the team's search strategies.