Systematic Reviews for the Health Sciences: Library Support Services

Eligibility: NIU-affiliated faculty, fellows, post-docs, students, staff in the College of Health and Human Sciences

Note: Students engaging in a class-project, dissertation, thesis, or capstone project are only eligible for Tier 1 support.

• Provide advice on research question formulation
• Assist with database selection
• Assist with an initial search strategy
• Provide support training on databases and citation management software

Eligibility: NIU-affiliated faculty, fellows, instructors, staff, post-docs in the College of Health and Human Sciences

Note: Tier 2 support dependent upon librarian's availability.

As co-author, librarians fulfill the ICMJE criteria for authorship.

• Collaborate on formulating research question
• Search for previously published systematic reviews on topic
• Collaborate on development and documentation of search protocol
• Create search strategies, search filters, translate search strategies
• Execute search strategies
• Maintain necessary documentation of search results
• Assist in deduplication of search results
• Draft relevant portion of search methods section
• Rerun final search for review update
• Review the manuscript prior to submission

Librarians do not assist with:

• Team management, including supervising or delegating work to student workers or research assistants
• Hand searching literature
• Screening citations for eligibility (inclusion and exclusion criteria)
• Data extraction
• Meta-analysis

Available upon request:

• Managing and Completing a Systematic Review
  • Theory
  • Workshop (software and tools)
• Advanced searching in databases
  • Developing searches
  • Translating search syntax

Librarian availability may impact response time or availability of Tier 2 services.

Both tiers of services are provided at no cost to the research team.  

If you are interested in either service tier, please contact Betsy Sterner, Health Sciences Librarian, esterner@niu.edu. Please include the following information:

• Name, status (e.g., NIU faculty, NIU Undergraduate)
• Names of all team members and roles (e.g., principal investigator, project manager, study screener, data extractor)
• Research question
• If known, have other reviews, including systematic reviews, been published on this topic? If yes, please list.
• If available, please share 3-10 gold standard articles (highly relevant to your topic and match your research question as well as inclusion and exclusion criteria)
• Please list any keywords or MeSH terms that could be useful
• Have you developed any inclusion and exclusion criteria? If yes, please list
• If already drafted, please include your protocol
• If known, which citation management software will you use?
• If known, which software will you use to blind screen the search results?