Librarian's Expertise Adds Rigor to Faculty Research Projects

Multidisciplinary Librarian Elle Covington came to the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries with a deep knowledge of various types of rigorous scholarly reviews—knowledge that was gained in the trenches.

“I was sort of thrown into the deep end with systematic reviews during my first year as a liaison librarian at the University of Texas in Austin,” Covington said. “I’d never heard of them before and all of a sudden, I had a bunch of PhD students and faculty knocking down my door needing help.”

That was four years ago. Covington learned as they went, eventually forming a Systematic Reviews Interest Group with other UT librarians. This group worked to develop a library service model for systematic, scoping, and umbrella reviews and provided workshops first for other librarians and then a six-workshop series for the full campus provided virtually during the pandemic.

Covington also had the opportunity to be part of an intensive Evidence Synthesis Institute in Spring of 2021.

There are many types of reviews used to answer a variety of scholarly questions. The most often encountered by librarians are systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and meta-analyses, all of which apply various degrees of rigor, scope, and time commitment. Covington recommends a 2009 article from Health Information & Libraries Journal to those wanting to learn more about different types of reviews.

In very general terms, systematic reviews and meta-analyses tend to be more appropriate for nursing and other health-related topics, while scoping reviews tend to be better tools for the social sciences.

There are three different levels of support librarians usually provide with these types of reviews depending on the need, the purpose, and time constraints. Most often, when a researcher contacts Covington, the researcher needs guidance on what the process of conducting a review entails. Together they discuss the process and develop an appropriate research question for the type of review the researcher wants to conduct or decide on the appropriate type of review to conduct for the research question they want answered. This usually takes one to two full consultations and is considered the first level of service.

If a researcher wants more librarian involvement, Covington will meet with them throughout the project and provide more in-depth support with building a search strategy, determining the best databases to use, helping them register a protocol on a platform like PROSPERO or Open Science Framework and help with adding additional materials to a data repository to help with the transparency and reproducibility required by the methodology. Usually, a librarian will ask to be acknowledged in the final publication for this level of service.

A third level of support for faculty and graduate students working on these projects is full co-authorship on the review. This is even required by some standards, based on certain publishers’ expectations. This generally means that the librarian will build the full search strategy, ask another librarian to peer review the search strategy, run the searches, and download the search results to a citation management software where the results can be deduplicated and sent to the screeners for the next stage of the project. The librarian may also put together parts of the protocol, register the protocol, develop the PRISMA flow diagram, and write significant portions of the methods section.

Covington has also provided significant support by providing trainings at the classroom, department, and campus levels for faculty and graduate students who are interested in learning more about the process.

The Department of Social Work is one of Covington’s major partners. From their first meeting, Social Work PhD candidate Christine Highfill was impressed with them.

“My first meeting with Elle was a presentation they gave to Social Work doctoral students,” Highfill said. “I asked a question about scoping reviews and their thorough answers let me know that they would be invaluable to my personal research and the scoping review training I do with other students.”

Now a regular collaborator of Covington’s, Highfill praises not just Covington, but librarians generally, for their contributions to the review process.

“The importance of systematic literature synthesis is that it follows a standardized process in order to produce the most rigorous study and least biased results possible,” she said. “Without a librarian consult, neither is possible. Librarians add rigor to the review process and help reduce the bias inherent in a study.”

Covington and Highfill have collaborated on more than Highfill’s projects. Together they have presented a session on the subject to faculty and PhD students hosted by the School of Social Work, and have plans to provide an expanded workshop in the coming months.

“Elle's skills, knowledge, and ability to communicate complex concepts clearly is an incredible asset to me and our university,” Highfill said.

While they complete this work as part of their everyday responsibilities, Covington sees review support as being inextricably linked with the guiding principles.

“Liaisons are the compassionate, knowledgeable sources of support for subject-area research,” they said. “We show how much we and the Libraries care about them by helping them through tough research projects that have them stressed out and unsure if they can even complete their degrees. We truly are partners with our researchers.”