Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Jan 1;109(1):52-61.
doi: 10.5195/jmla.2021.1031.

Assessing the roles and challenges of librarians in dental systematic and scoping reviews

Nena Schvaneveldt  1 , Elizabeth M Stellrecht  2
Affiliations

Assessing the roles and challenges of librarians in dental systematic and scoping reviews

Nena Schvaneveldt et al. J Med Libr Assoc. .

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this study was to determine the scope of experience, roles, and challenges that librarians face in participating in dental and oral health systematic and scoping reviews to inform outreach efforts to researchers and identify areas for librarian professional development.

Methods: The authors developed a twenty-three-item survey based on the findings of two recent articles about health sciences librarians' roles and challenges in conducting systematic and scoping reviews. The survey was distributed via electronic mailing lists to librarians who were likely to have participated in conducting dental systematic and scoping reviews.

Results: While survey respondents reported participating in many dental reviews, they participated more commonly in systematic reviews than in scoping reviews. Also, they worked less commonly on dental and oral health reviews than on non-dental reviews. Librarian roles in dental reviews tended to follow traditional librarian roles: all respondents had participated in planning and information retrieval stages, whereas fewer respondents had participated in screening and assessing articles. The most frequently reported challenges involved the lead reviewer or review team rather than the librarians themselves, with time- and methodology-related challenges being most common.

Conclusions: Although librarians might not be highly involved in dental and oral health systematic and scoping reviews, more librarian participation in these reviews, either as methodologists or information experts, may improve their reviews' overall quality.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Numbers of dental and non-dental reviews conducted
Figure 2
Figure 2
Number of published dental systematic and scoping reviews
Figure 3
Figure 3
Numbers of reviews by category
Figure 4
Figure 4
Dental librarian roles in different stages of the systematic or scoping review process
Figure 5
Figure 5
Challenges in working with the lead researcher
Figure 6
Figure 6
Challenges in working with the review team
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Arksey H, O'Malley L. Scoping studies: towards a methodological framework. Int J Soc Res Methodol. 2005;8(1):19–32. DOI: 10.1080/1364557032000119616. - DOI
    1. Grant MJ, Booth A. A typology of reviews: an analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies. Health Inf Libr J. 2009. June;26(2):91–108. DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-1842.2009.00848.x. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Higgins JPT, Green S eds. Cochrane handbook for systematic reviews of interventions [Internet]. Version 6 London, UK: Cochrane Collaboration; 2019. [cited 15 Oct 2020]. <http://handbook.cochrane.org>.
    1. Page MJ, Shamseer L, Altman DG, Tetzlaff J, Sampson M, Tricco AC, Catalá-López F, Li L, Reid EK, Sarkis-Onofre R, Moher D. Epidemiology and reporting characteristics of systematic reviews of biomedical research: a cross-sectional study. PLoS Med. 2016;13(5):e1002028 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002028. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Faggion CM Jr., Huivin R, Aranda L, Pandis N, Alarcon M. The search and selection for primary studies in systematic reviews published in dental journals indexed in MEDLINE was not fully reproducible. J Clin Epidemiol. 2018. June;98(1):53–61. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2018.02.011. - DOI - PubMed

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources