2020 Spring Forum: Judy Wright

The 2020 UHMLG Spring Forum is focusing on getting involved with systematic reviews. With six presentations, it promises to be an interesting and informative day. With the opportunity to network with colleagues from across the HE and NHS sectors, it’s a great value event for all health and medical librarians.

Tips and tricks of the trade – sharing and remembering (nearly) everything about systematic review searching

A challenge when delivering a systematic review service is keeping up to date with new search methods, changing software interfaces and remembering everything useful you’ve discovered along the way. Useful nuggets of knowledge can be small seemingly every-day things such as when to use a ? or # truncation symbol in Ovid, and then which one to use in ProQuest. We also learn and develop ad hoc skills to deal with problems as and when they arise, for example,  working out how to manage records from a database you rarely use that doesn’t have export or import functions. These nuggets can be quickly forgotten or lost, buried in a sub-folder of a sub-folder or a post-it note mountain. Weeks, months or years later you remember that you had that useful nugget of knowledge, or had solved that problem before, but can’t remember how did it or where you noted it down.

This session will share practical tips of how you can share and manage the knowledge of all things related to your systematic review searching within your team. I’ll explain how we use an internal Wiki to store tips and tricks for literature searching, reference management, consistent search reporting, database syntax, local operating procedures and much more.  It helps us remember things like  “What year did Web of Science – SCI begin?”, “How do I report a search from ClinicalTrials.gov?”, “What’s the latest guidance on rapid reviews searches?” or “Have we done searches for overviews of systematic reviews before and what did we call the strategies”? Alongside describing the Wiki, I will highlight some of the most heavily used ‘tips’ and other methods we use to keep up to date.

Biography: Judy Wright

Judy Wright is the Senior Information Specialist at the University of Leeds. Judy has been collaborating on systematic reviews and teaching search methods since 2002, initially for the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group and then for Leeds Institute of Health Sciences. Judy manages a team of Information Specialists who support a range of systematic review types including rapid, qualitative, economic modelling and realist reviews for projects funded by NIHR, MRC, ESRC and charities.