Objectives: Researchers from many institutes, both academic and non-academix perform and publish systematic reviews. Many of these institutes have a medical library that offers SR services to their researchers. Sometimes researchers seek assistance but cannot find it, or they fail to seek assistance, yet they will still pursue their review. Thus, many systematic reviews are published without assistance of a medical librarian. Our aim is to investigate barriers to using assistance from a medical library, and to develop ideas how we can improve the percentage of SRs that are assisted by medical libraries.
Methods: We surveyed corresponding authors of systematic reviews from researchers from university hospitals. We asked them whether or not they had used assistance from a search specialist. If they had not used assistance we asked further for the reasons and barriers for not asking for assistance. We surveyed medical librarians from university hospitals about the percentage of SR projects in their institute that they serve. We will investigate the barriers to serving all requests.
Results: Results are not yet available, but will be added when the abstract is accepted.
Conclusions: At our institute we assist 90% of the systematic reviews, thus improving the scientific quality of the publications. However, when we are asked to do peer review of systematic reviews we see SRs from university employees based on inferieor searches that have been developed without the assistance of a librarian. The aim of our research is to inspire medical librarians to become guardians of their organization's systematic review output either by offering peer review of researchers developed searches, or by offering librarian-mediated searches. That was each SR project should be based on a high quality search from the start of the project.
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