Completing high quality systematic reviews depends upon a number of factors; the most important is the team that is assembled to support this endeavor.   Important areas of expertise to cover include:

• Content Experts: One or more individuals to act as active consultants and investigator-level reviewers. These team members provide expertise in the subject area covered by the review and represent a variety of perspectives that will add to the quality of the process and resulting publication.
• Systematic Review Methods Experts: One or more individuals with expertise in the methods of conducting systematic reviews. A librarian or information specialist can contribute in this role, especially if they bring to the table past experience. This role can also be filled by a content expert.
• Statistician: This team player is critical especially if meta-analysis is being considered.
• Medical Librarian/Information Specialist: Knowledge about the various bibliographic databases and controlled vocabularies supports the development of a search strategy that will generate relevant and focused results. In addition, the librarian searcher can document and write the methods section of the manuscript as well as support the team in leveraging citation management tools.
• Reference Coordinator: Someone from the team needs to be the point person for maintaining and managing the database of references. Most systematic reviews involve thousands of abstracts/papers and it is vital to manage these references and keep track of what has been reviewed, and which ones will be included or excluded.

The Memorial Sloan Kettering Library launched a Systematic Review Service a few years ago and our librarians have since been co-authors on several publications. Recently, I read a paper entitled: “Librarian co-authors correlated with higher quality reported search strategies in general internal medicine systematic reviews”.  This paper demonstrated that engaging a librarian or information professional is a potential way to help improve documentation of the search strategy, and bring very specific skill sets to the team.

In reflection, what would be wonderful to see moving forward is for a standard to be established whereby journal editors would include an experienced librarian in reviewing the search strategy developed and executed as part of the overall review process for the submitted systematic review manuscript — ensuring that only the highest quality systematic review papers are made available to their readers!  If you think this is a good idea, don’t hesitate to let me know!

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services