A decade of systematic reviews: an assessment of Weill Cornell Medicine's systematic review service

Abstract

Background: The Weill Cornell Medicine, Samuel J. Wood Library’s Systematic Review (SR) service began in 2011, with 2021 marking a decade of service. This paper will describe how the service policies have grown and will break down our service quantitatively over the past 11 years to examine SR timelines and trends. Case Presentation: We evaluated 11 years (2011-2021) of SR request data from our in-house documentation. In the years assessed, there have been 319 SR requests from 20 clinical departments, leading to 101 publications with at least one librarian collaborator listed as co-author. The average review took 642 days to publication, with the longest at 1408 days, and the shortest at 94 days. On average, librarians spent 14.7 hours in total on each review. SR projects were most likely to be abandoned at the title/abstract screening phase. Several policies have been put into place over the years in order to accommodate workflows and demand for our service. Discussion: The SR service has seen several changes since its inception in 2011. Based on the findings and emerging trends discussed here, our service will inevitably evolve further to adapt to these changes, such as machine learning-assisted technology.

Keywords

• Evidence synthesis
• systematic reviews
• meta-analysis
• library services
• research services