(Apologies for cross-posting)
Hello colleagues,
I'm writing as chair of the Evidence Synthesis Working Group at Brock University to share a document which may be useful to others: our newly updated evidence synthesis work plan. (You should be able to download the doc at that link)
We use this when supporting researchers at our Tier 2 extended consultation level of support and find it very useful to guide and collaborate with them through steps including:
- Finetuning a research question
- Searching for existing ES reviews on their topic
- Listing target articles and mining them for development of a preliminary search strategy
- Selecting inclusion and exclusion criteria
- Developing a final search strategy
I typically ask researchers (who are often grad students) to complete Parts 1 and 2 before our first meeting, and then provide in-depth guidance for the subsequent elements of the work plan as we continue to meet.
You'll see it has a CC-BY-SA-NC Creative Commons licence, so please feel to reuse and adapt.
A big thank you to:
- Alix Hayden and Zahra Premji for making their wonderful Mining seed papers and search development template openly available – we have modified it for inclusion in our workplan
- To the authors of these great papers for publishing them open access, so we could use them as models for completing a scoping review or systematic review workplan:
- K. Alix Hayden, Sarah Elaine Eaton, Helen Pethrick, Katherine Crossman, Bartlomiej A. Lenart, Lee-Ann Penaluna, "A Scoping Review of Text-Matching Software Used for Student Academic Integrity in HigherEducation", Education Research International, vol. 2021, Article I
- Langham-Putrow A, Bakker C, Riegelman A (2021) Is the open access citation advantage real? A systematic review of the citation of open access and subscription-based articles. PLoS ONE 16(6):e0253129. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253129
- We deliberately choose articles not focused on a specific academic discipline to make them more generalizable
This work plan had its origins in a similar document which used to exist on the University of Ottawa Health Sciences Library website – I had adapted that document many years ago, but can no longer find the original to give it a credit. (Happy to provide attribution if someone can point me to the right spot)
Kind regards,
Elizabeth
------------------------------
Elizabeth Yates
Research and Scholarly Communication Librarian
James A. Gibson Library, Brock University
------------------------------