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Systematic Reviews

This guide lists resources related to conducting a Systematic Review.

Library Support

Librarian involvement in systematic reviews is a practice recommendation by the Institute of Medicine and leading sources of evidence-based information including Cochrane, the Joanna Briggs Institute and the Campbell Collaboration. Research has shown that librarian involvement in systematic reviews increases the quality of search strategies (Koffel, 2015) and reporting (Meert et al., 2016; Rethlefsen et al., 2015).

The Library currently offers appointments to Ontario Tech faculty and students conducting systematic reviews.** Potential topics for the appointment may include:

  • Database/resource selection for specific topics
  • Database/resource-specific search methods and techniques
  • Saving the search strategy in various database platforms
  • Citation management and review software
  • Search methods for locating grey literature
  • Additional methods for locating studies (searching trial registries, hand-searching, cited reference searching etc.)
  • Obtaining full-text articles via the Library website and Interlibrary Loan (ILL)

**Please note: The Library is currently limited in our capacity to provide 1-on-1 support for systematic review research at this time. Students and faculty working on these projects are highly encouraged to view the recording of Systematic Review Workshop #1: Literature Searching for Knowledge Synthesis (last offered in Fall 2020)  in the HLSC 5011G/7012G time slot.

For more information about the workshops, please email Lydia Thorne, Health Sciences Librarian at lydia.thorne@ontariotechu.ca 

Library Resources