Background: A team of librarians at our academic medical library adapted the PRESS (Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies) checklist and introduced a standardized method of librarian peer review into our systematic review process. While the PRESS checklist is daunting, our adaptations and documentation have made it seamless to incorporate into our process.
Attendees will understand the rationale for implementing an additional step into the already lengthy systematic review process. Attendees will have access to our adapted PRESS checklist to implement in their own systematic review workflows, as well as examples of our documentation.
Description: Two years ago, our systematic review team at an academic medical library adapted the PRESS checklist, incorporating librarian peer review into our systematic review process as a step towards improving the quality of our searches. Peer review adds a significant additional time burden to an already lengthy process, but has improved the quality and sensitivity of our searches since implementation. Since introducing peer review, our team has peer reviewed over 20 systematic review searches, many of which are in the publication stage currently.
More than just quality control, the practice of peer reviewing our systematic review searches has made our team better searchers and has deepened our knowledge of subject and non-subject databases. In this presentation, we will share our process, show examples of our peer reviewed searches, and describe the added value of peer review for our researchers.
Conclusion: We are comparing published searches from researchers at our institution that use our librarian systematic review service to published searches from researchers at our institution which did not use our service in terms of: 1) search quality and 2) search sensitivity. An area of future study for our team is to retrospectively peer review published searches from our institution which did not use our service and compare our peer reviewed/updated search result to those which did not use our service. We anticipate retrieving more relevant results from our retrospectively peer reviewed searches. These results will demonstrate the value of our librarian peer review and allow us to continue peer reviewing search strategies for our systematic review service.
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