Organizing your Systematic Review: Project Notes Template for Librarians
Updated January 15, 2017
Do you ever find that sometimes it’s the most practical information that we often fail to share or teach?
As a librarian designing search strategies for systematic reviews and supporting review teams for over two years now basically as a full-time job, I feel like I’ve finally streamlined things. The processes that I’ve developed make planning, executing, and reporting the search strategy for a systematic review really straightforward – but it wasn’t always this way. Everything I use is based on trial and error, and in speaking with other librarians.
Knowing that this kind of uber practical stuff isn’t often shared online, I figured I’d put some of it up in the hopes that maybe some of you might find it useful, or better yet, generate discussion and maybe sharing of your own tools or processes you use to keep things organized (email meeee!).
For starters I figured I’d begin with the core working document that I use basically from day one, and which absolutely saves my butt every time we roll around to manuscript writing time, because it contains every conceivable detail and thought process throughout the search strategy design:
Systematic Review Project Notes Template for Librarians
Systematic Review Project Notes Document by Sarah Visintini is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
The Way I Use this Form:
Team & Project Information
Basically how I use this thing is I keep all the research group and project information at the top, along with any key decision items, so that: a) I don’t have to go digging through emails to see what we ended up deciding on or b) so that I’m not constantly asking them what databases they have considered or review management software they want to use.
When I’m juggling lots of systematic reviews at the same time keeping them all straight from memory alone can be challenging, and I rely on this section of the document to help me re-immerse myself in the important details of the project, either when I’m ready to have another crack at the search strategy design, or in preparation for a meeting with the investigators.
Databases Table
This table remains empty for the majority of the time that I’m working on this document, but I like to keep it at the top so that when I come back to these notes to write the search methods section, most of my key information is front and centre. I also like to copy and paste this table into my final search results email with researchers so that they have a lot of the core information regarding what databases were run and when for their own records.
Search Strategy Design
This is probably the messiest section and has most of my testing and ideas popped in. I don’t usually use this section much after the fact (favouring the search histories and databases table for the majority of my write up) but it doesn’t hurt either.
Relevant Systematic Reviews
This is a new section I have recently started adding to prompt me to make sure I search for any reviews on the same topic in case the topic has been scooped or there is overlap, as well as to have a tidy place to list out some of the search strategies others have used for similar (but not significantly overlapping) topics. So for example if I was conducting a systematic review on X and Y I would have two subcategories here where I’d copy and paste some good search strategies for X and some good ones for Y so that I could make a beautiful Frankenbaby search* and ensure I wasn’t missing any good terms.
*This may also come into play come manuscript writing time, when you might be citing the review as the basis for your own search strategy.
Target Articles
Any articles that the team provide to me as being “target articles”/”pearls”/”definite includes” go in this section. Often I will have them in a variety of formats (in a reference list, in a PubMed PMID list for search testing, or in the Ovid Medline .ui. chain – again for search testing). If I end up finding some additional articles that the team deems include-worthy I will also add these here, usually with most current at the top, so that I always know that I am using the latest list of target articles.
Emails
I obviously don’t include everything here, but if there were any decision points in the emails I exchange between myself and the researchers I like to paste them in here for reference so that I can just skim the essentials rather than digging through email threads. This has actually saved me when I went back to write search methods for a review after having moved to a new position – I had lost all my old emails but still had the salient details in my project notes.
Search Histories
Arguably the most important part of the document, I copy and paste my search history every time I search a database for the project. Typically by the end of a search strategy design process there will be between 5 and 15 entries here by date and database, so that if I have any doubts or questions I can go back through my process and look at what my searches were pulling in. On particularly tricky searches or when I’m testing out a lot of stuff, I’ll often leave myself notes using the Comments features in Word. This has actually come in handy a number of times when either peer reviewers or researchers have asked, “Have you thought of using term….?” and saves me time duplicating tests I’ve already conducted.
Happy systematic searching!