Librarians learning together to enhance their evidence synthesis expertise

Librarians learning together to enhance their evidence synthesis expertise

Guest post by Siobhan Bowman, Paul Breen, Stephanie Chen, Breeda Herlihy, Ronan Madden, Ben Williamson of UCC Library.
Introduction
Evidence synthesis or knowledge synthesis are terms used to describe a research methodology where information from multiple sources is brought together to answer a specific question and provide a comprehensive and reliable summary of available evidence.  The humble literature review or narrative review is a type of evidence synthesis along with many other types including systematic reviews, scoping reviews, qualitative evidence synthesis, integrative reviews and umbrella reviews.  Searching the literature for a review is a fundamental part of undertaking evidence synthesis and this is where librarians can support and enable research.
A number of UCC Library colleagues, including the Library’s Learning & Teaching Team, decided to set up a Community of Practice on evidence synthesis earlier this year. The aim was to build on some existing experience and to develop the expertise to help meet the demand for support from UCC staff and students. One part of this involved undertaking some collaborative learning in the form of a free online course developed by the Evidence Synthesis Institute and Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) from the US. The course “
Evidence Synthesis for Librarians and Information Specialists
”
(Kocher, M., Riegelman, A., Kibbee, M., Young, S., Bostrom, M., Marsalis, S., Premji, Z.)
is a 15-module course developed by evidence synthesis librarians and subject librarians from various American and Canadian university libraries.  Over a period of a few months in a quieter part of the year, we set out a timetable for working through a group of modules on our own and followed each group of modules with a meeting to share insights, clarify complex topics, and relate the course material to our own experiences.
The outline of the course shows how relevant it is to librarians and information specialists and each of us gives an account further below of how we found the process of learning about evidence synthesis together.
Module 1: Introduction to evidence synthesis
Module 2: Exploring different review methodologies
Module 3: Reproducibility: the importance of transparent evidence synthesis methods
Module 4: Evidence synthesis steps and librarians as co-investigators
Module 5: Systematic review guidelines/checklists/reporting standards
Module 6: Introduction to protocols and protocol registration
Module 7: Formulating a research question
Module 8: Frameworks and eligibility criteria
Module 9: Reference interview
Module 10: Selecting databases for evidence synthesis
Module 11: Search strategies
Module 12: Adapting searches across database platforms
Module 13: Grey literature
Module 14: Supplementary search methods
Module 15: Writing the methods section and PRISMA flow diagrams
Siobhan Bowman, Learning Support Li…