Defining the Librarian's Role in a Continuing Evidence Monitoring Pilot Project

Background: With the increase in published research and need for updated evidence-based guidelines and policies, methods for updating systematic reviews have become an emerging area of interest for researchers and librarians alike. Our organization recently developed and piloted a new model for continuous evidence monitoring (CEM). The CEM model was created to improve the process of updating searches, compiling results, and screening, and analyzing relevant articles on an ongoing, periodic basis to better distribute the work involved in the production and updating of reviews across a longer period of time.

Description: To develop our CEM methods, we formed an interest group of five systematic review analysts and two systematic review librarians to pilot the program. As a result of the successful pilot, the team is now using CEM across a larger number of systematic reviews.

The librarian's role in the CEM model, as with other systematic reviews, involves creating and peer-reviewing the literature search, and running, compiling, and documenting the results. Traditionally, systematic reviews searches are created and run twice. In CEM, searches must be run on a continuous basis leading up to publication. CEM requires that search strategies incorporate new terms to ensure the currency of the search. This presentation will discuss strategies for updating searches periodically, deciding the frequency on which searches are run, and operationalizing manual and automated searches across various databases.

Conclusion: The transition to CEM requires changes to the librarian’s workflow in literature searches—librarians must work with the research team to determine search update frequency and operationalizing searches across the databases and software used by the team. Conducting the literature search and screening process across a longer timeline provides librarians and researchers more flexibility to balance their workload, but does not decrease resources, time or staff needed to complete a review. As the approach to updating reviews evolve, librarians play an important role in advancing new developments in actively monitoring, gathering and disseminating research evidence.