Dear Colleagues around the World:

 

I'm writing this on behalf of myself and colleagues here at a health sciences library who are increasingly approached by individuals at our academic medical center to provide search expertise for their "systematic review" projects.  This is all well and good and we are glad for the opportunity.  However, we often face a dilemma when the requesters' understanding of systematic review differs from our own understanding.  Often we are approached by people who wish to call a project a "systematic review" when they have no intention of devoting additional time to scrutinizing results from multiple databases and do not have funding for searching databases to which we only have access through fee-based searching. This is exacerbated by the fact that often articles appear in respected journals that have “systematic review” in the article title but that do not seem to be held to the same standards of our own concept of a systematic review.

 

This question is not about which databases really need to be searched; there have been discussions on this listserv along those lines in the past which I followed.  The question is really for search experts on this list: how do you manage expectations of those who ask for your help? How do you articulate the need for standards and negotiate when you feel an ethical responsibility to do a more thorough and complete search than the requesters would like for you to do? We negotiate for authorship and I realize that we could use that as a lever to ensure that the limitations of the methodology are well described in the final manuscript.

 

Best regards,

Nancy Adams

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Nancy E. Adams, MLIS
Associate Director   |   Penn State Hershey George T. Harrell Health Sciences Library
Milton S. Hershey Medical Center   |   Penn State College of Medicine
500 University Drive, PO Box 850   |  Hershey, PA 17033-0850  |  Phone: 717-531-8989

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