Systematic Literature Reviews

In September 2021 I started working on a systematic literature Review with another librarian here at the university after helping one of the faculty in our School of Education get started on a similar project with some of her colleagues. systematic literature reviews are a type of study that developed in the health sciences as a way to make literature reviews more like a mixed methods study that could be replicated, and have slowly been adopted in other social sciences, including Library Science. At this point, there have been relatively few of these projects published in library journals, so it seemed like a project that would be interesting and have a good chance of being published. Librarians here are encouraged to publish, but publication is just one of the "creative scholarly projects" that we are evaluated on each year or if we seek promotion.

We just presented our work at the Association of College & Research Libraries Conference, which was held in Pittsburgh this year, but our presentation was not a complete view because our analysis is not complete. Trying to juggle the schedules of two librarians and a paraprofessional staff member (who also has an MLIS) makes getting a study of this sort done, especially when one of the team members is working on a doctoral degree.

Also, systematic literature reviews are hard.

Very, very hard.

Here it is in a nutshell:

1. Choose a topic
2. Create a study protocol
3. Develop search terms and phrases
4. Document search phrases and information sources searched
5. Download all of the articles and/or request via ILL
6. Remove duplicates
7. Exclude articles that aren't relevant
8. Analyze articles using CASP or similar checklists
9. Identify trends and themes
10. Write it all up using the PRISMA checklist
11. Publish!

After many fits and starts, we're at stages nine and ten. My goal is for us to get this thing written up and submitted to a journal by July. 

I'll probably expand on the process over the next few weeks, but one of the things I've been thinking about is how this would look for a literature review in History - not that I imagine that anyone would publish such a thing if it existed.