This May, I attended the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association in Portland, OR. It was a great experience. It afforded me the opportunity to learn a lot, reconnect with old colleagues, and meet new ones.
Along with some other colleagues at the University at Buffalo, I am a co-developer of our Evidence Syntheses Service so most of the programming I went to had a focus on systematic reviews [SRs] and specifically about similar services. There were also some interesting sessions about the use of AI with SRs. “An empirical study evaluating ChatGPT’s performance in generating search strategies for systematic reviews” looked at how well the free and premium versions of ChatGPT worked with both question formulation and search strategy. Not unsurprisingly, the premium version of ChatGPT performed better. I am personally still not sure where AI fits in conducting SRs, but there are definitely some tedious parts of reviews that it would be nice to have automated.
“’Do I really need to work with a Librarian?’: Exploring the Reporting and Reproducibility of Comprehensive Reviews Published on an Academic Medical Campus” and “Examining Institutional Evidence Synthesis Publications to Inform Outreach & Provision of Service for an Academic Library’s Evidence Synthesis Service” were a few sessions I attended where librarians had run searches of SRs done at their institutions and then evaluated the reviews to see if a librarian had been involved and to evaluate the quality of the reviews.
Several of the papers I heard dealt with managing workload, team preparation, dealing with ill-formed research questions, and other issues. “Defining our scope: Eliminating “service creep” in library systematic review support services” was an engaging lightning talk with some suggestions for some of these issues. For instance, requiring that a protocol be written before meeting with a team and having the SR coordinator being firm about compliance with their policies were suggested. Lydia Howes gave a lightning talk, “What to do when the SR team is at capacity: Grab a number, get in line, and learn SR methodology” and shared that their library utilizes learning checklists “to provide a scaffolded approach to learning” for their teams so they are better prepared to write protocols and conduct reviews.
“Speed Dating Through Evidence Synthesis Education: Finding Your Instructional Match” was a great immersion session where we heard from a panel of librarians and then did breakouts working our way through questions designed to help us figure out solutions to a lot of the very common hurdles that come from SRs. One of the presenters, Sally Smith, talked specifically about a course she has developed and mounted on their course management system designed to help both non-medical librarians and research teams with learning the basics of conducting Evidence Syntheses projects. Another librarian shared that she had created scripts for every aspect of doing a review that she could then email each time. All of these are things that I would like to suggest that we adapt for our own purposes at our library.
Thank you UNYOC, for awarding me UNYOC Professional Development Scholarship!
Photo from left to right: Liz Stellrecht, Molly Maloney, Jocelyn Swick-Jemison, Amy Lyons, Michelle Zafron, and Nell Aronoff
