Systematic Review and Evidence Synthesis Support

The Three Tiers of Evidence Synthesis Assistance

Scroll down to learn more about the kinds of evidence synthesis assistance CMU Librarians can provide.

Eligibility for Evidence Synthesis Assistance:

Tier One and Tier Two: One or more members of the research team must be a CMU student, post-doctoral researcher, staff member, faculty member, fellow, resident, or medical education partner.

Tier Three: At least one person on the research team must be a CMU faculty member or medical education partner.

Please note that the availability of assistance on all three tiers, and particularly for Tier Three, is dependent on librarian's available time and other workload considerations.

Eligibility for Tier One Assistance

One or more members of the research team must be a CMU student, post-doctoral researcher, staff member, faculty member, fellow, resident, or medical education partner.

As part of their work as subject specialists, librarians providing Tier One assistance can:

• Provide general education on evidence synthesis and the systematic review research process
• Advise on the type of evidence synthesis most appropriate for a research question
• Verify the question has not recently been addressed in a published systematic review
• Advise on protocols for evidence synthesis
• Advise on database selection
• Advise on reporting standards and best practices (e.g. PRISMA Guidelines, Cochrane, IOM, etc.)
• Advise on software tools for organizing systematic reviews
• Refer to teams to the Statistical Consulting Center for assistance in analyzing data from full text studies.

Eligibility for Tier Two Assistance

One or more members of the research team must be a CMU student, post-doctoral researcher, staff member, faculty member, fellow, resident, or medical education partner.

Librarians can provide advanced help to research teams. If you feel it has been helpful, it would be greatly appreciated to include them in the acknowledgement section of any publication or presentation.

Librarians providing Tier Two assistance can:

• Help tailor the research question
• Advise on inclusion/exclusion criteria
• Identify databases for that could be helpful for the project
• Identify some beginning keywords or controlled vocabulary
• Peer review an existing search strategy
• Obtain full text of published papers including interlibrary loan requests.

Eligibility for Tier Three Assistance

**At least one person on the research team must be a CMU faculty member or medical education partner.**

To provide in-depth assistance, a librarian must be invited to be part of the research team and a co-author on the project.

Please note that assistance on all three tiers, and particularly for Tier Three, is dependent on librarian's available time and other workload considerations.

For more information about involving librarians as co-authors on your review, please view the Authorship Guidelines.

Librarians providing Tier Three assistance can, given available time and workload considerations:

• Help formulate the research question
• Help formulate the inclusion/exclusion criteria
• Identify most or all keywords and subject headings/controlled vocabulary using seed/sentinel articles identified by the research team
• Develop reproducible, comprehensive search strategies
• Translate strategies for each database
• Conduct searches in multiple databases
• Export results to citation management tool
• Document search result numbers for PRISMA flow chart and archive search strategies
• Remove duplicate records/De-duplicate a set of results
• Assist with screening of results by study format and excluding results with no or not enough original data (i.e., other reviews, conference abstracts, etc.)
• Upload full text PDFs to shared platform
• Write Methods section, describing the search strategy and its execution
• Provide appendix with search strategy from all included databases.

In special circumstances, librarians may also:

• Assist with screening based on inclusion/exclusion criteria
• Act as project manager for part or all of the research process.

Please contact your librarian to request Tier 3 Assistance!

Medicine

Rebecca Renirie: hill2ra@cmich.edu

Tamara Sawyer: tamara.sawyer@cmich.edu 

Health Professions

Elizabeth Heitsch: heits1e@cmich.edu

Education

Stephanie Mathson: maths1sm@cmich.edu

Other Subject Areas

If you are considering inviting a librarian to your evidence synthesis team as a co-author for Tier Three service, consider the following authorship guidelines.

As a member of the research team with co-authorship on the final published work, librarians must:

• Make substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Draft the work or review it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Grant final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.