Systematic and Scoping Review Service

All WashU Medicine faculty, students, researchers, and staff are eligible for Becker Library systematic review services. There is no fee for this service, but you may need to budget funds for other parts of the review (purchasing software, statistician consultations, etc.).

Alumni, former staff/faculty, and Danforth Campus affiliates (including from the Brown School) are not eligible unless they hold a joint appointment with the medical school.

If your systematic review team includes collaborators outside of WashU Medicine, at least one team member must be currently affiliated with WashU Medicine. The current WUSM project member must submit the search request form, serve as the primary project contact, and attend all meetings.

We will work with your team to design and report thorough search strategies based on guidelines and standards set forth by PRISMA. We will also provide:

1. Detailed search strategies
2. Citation library of de-duplicated results (EndNote or RIS format)
3. Access to a Covidence account (optional)
4. Excel workbook of search results (optional)
5. Methods section regarding search design and implementation according to PRISMA
6. Data required for generating a PRISMA flow diagram

According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, authorship should be based on the following four criteria:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

The project librarian’s contribution to your systematic or scoping review project typically meets ICMJE authorship criteria. The librarian will provide a comprehensive description of the search methods and complete search strategies that can be included in the manuscript (as required by PRISMA reporting standards), and will also build the citation library. Please discuss any authorship questions or concerns with your project librarian.

A complete systematic or scoping review project from searching through screening, to creating a manuscript can take as long as 18 months. The search component can take up to 8 weeks to complete based on the complexity of the search and prior project commitments. Your project librarian can give you a more accurate estimate of the time required to complete the search component after you have submitted the search request form. 

To fill out the Review Search Request Form, you will need:

1. To have already conducted a preliminary search.
2. A list of all members of your project team including screeners, consultants, PIs, and any others that will be involved in completing your project. Evidence synthesis projects typically require a minimum of three project members for methodological rigor.
3. A brief summary of your research question.
4. Inclusion and exclusion criteria.
5. A minimum of three benchmark articles. These articles should meet your inclusion criteria and will likely be included in your final analysis.
6. An approximate timeline/deadline for completion of the systematic review project.

Projects that are part of a course assignment are not eligible for comprehensive systematic or scoping review services. Instead, librarians will provide a pilot version of a search for one database. The pilot search will provide an evidence base for completion of an assignment and may be converted to a full review if publication is a future goal. Pilot searches are only available to students attending courses delivered by WashU School of Medicine programs.

Systematic or scoping review projects completed as part of a dissertation or thesis project are not usually eligible for comprehensive services. A pilot search and/or a librarian consultation will be provided.

Investigators submitting requests for comprehensive literature searches for projects with grant funding are expected to include library efforts in the grant as an unpaid expert consultant.

We do not provide full-text article retrieval as part of our systematic or scoping review service. However, your librarian can show project members the process for retrieving full text and can assist with locating difficult-to-find resources. Our Full-Text Retrieval guide outlines how to retrieve full-text articles and how to save time by optimizing EndNote to automatically pull articles available from Becker library’s journal collection.

Interlibrary loan (ILL) is available for articles that are not part of Becker Library’s subscriptions. There are no fees for requesting items through ILL. More information can be found here: https://becker.wustl.edu/services/interlibrary-loan/