Search Club Supporting Knowledge Exchange and Collaboration

Background: As two academic health science libraries serving similar, geographically adjacent institutions that are actively enhancing their research outputs, we created a Search Club to improve our skills in meeting library search requests and systematic review support. The Search Club developed out of an existing collaboration that had proven to be beneficial to our respective institutions and colleagues. The goals of our Search Club were to review and appraise published systematic review searches, improve skills related to comprehensive bibliographic searching and collectively develop a toolkit for systematic reviews that would be tailored to the scope and scale of our respective institutions.

Description: Building off of an existing collaboration, the authors invited colleagues from our respective institutions to join a Search Club for quarterly meetings. For our initial meetings we spent the first hour reviewing a pre-assigned published systematic review search strategy and methodology and the second hour working on a similarly themed research question and strategy. Both authors and one other Search Club member had completed outside systematic review training from different organizations with variation in coverage. Working from those variations, we appraised the research questions, search strategies, and methods section to improve our overall understanding of comprehensive search development. As the initiators of the Search Club, the authors curated systematic reviews and published search strategies, suggested focus areas for appraisal such as research question formats, term selection, synonyms, and tags and proposed the research topic for building a collaborative search strategy.

Conclusion: Due to the pandemic, our meetings didn’t occur as frequently as planned. Our meetings have included librarians who were not responsible for research support as a way of enhancing their understanding of comprehensive search skills and workflows. Our current goal is to create a toolkit designed to meet the unique needs of small health sciences universities, with the expected outcomes of:
-Enhancing workflows and communications around literature reviews involving comprehensive searches
-Increasing awareness of review article methodologies for students and faculty
-Creating time savings through improved methodology and search practices
-Reducing duplicated training efforts by our institutions
-Increasing the visibility and credibility of our respective libraries
-Relationship building among libraries colleagues