Scoping Reviews

UT librarians offer scoping review consultation services for individuals and research groups. We can help with:

• Translating a research question into an appropriate search strategy
• Locating existing systematic reviews and protocols to inform your approach
• Maximizing the balance between search precision and retrieval 
• Selecting databases for systematic searching
• Advising on grey literature search strategies
• Strategies and tools for saving, managing and exporting search results and citations

When to credit a librarian

Much of the work a librarian does to assist researchers falls under their everyday job responsibilities. However, systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and meta-analyses, often require greater librarian involvement and may include direct use of a librarian's intellectual property. When these levels of assistance lead to a published paper, it is appropriate to credit the librarian involved. 

Involvement and expectation may differ by librarian, and levels of librarian involvement and acknowledgement should be part of the systematic review consultation. However, we've compiled some basic guidelines below:

• Uncredited
  • Overview of review process and best practices
  • Identifying keywords and databases
  • Recommending tools
  • Single consultation
• Acknowledgement or Contributor note
  • Troubleshooting search strategy
  • Data management consultation
  • More than one consultation
• Authorship (one or more of the following)
  • Using search strategy or filter written by librarian
  • Help registering a protocol
  • Citation retrieval and management
  • Hand searching for articles
  • Assisting with paper's methods section
  • Section edits