Objective: This lightning talk will provide a brief description of a scoping review designed to identify the extent to which generative AI is being used in the search methods of evidence synthesis reviews. We will compare tools and strategies used by review authors, and extract details on the level of reporting.

Methods: The JBI scoping review methodology will guide the conduct of this review. After calibration exercises on screening and data extraction were completed, an a priori protocol was published on OSF Registries. To be eligible for inclusion, a review must be a known type of evidence synthesis, and authors must have either used a generative-AI powered tool to develop database search strategies or used an AI search engine to locate references directly. We will search from Jan 2022 to present: Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase, Ovid PsycINFO, EBSCO CINAHL, EBSCO ERIC, ProQuest Sociological Abstracts, Elsevier Scopus, and Clarivate Web of Science Core Collection. We will conduct a supplementary full-text search in EBSCO MEDLINE, EBSCO CINAHL and Lens.org. We will independently screen in two stages in Covidence; disagreements will be resolved by consensus and discussion. We will extract study characteristics; characteristics related to the method, type of chatbot or AI search engine used; description of search method; and search reporting elements. The results will be presented in tables, accompanied by descriptive summaries.

Results and Discussion: This project will provide insights into the adoption and reporting of generative AI tools in KS searches.

Background: Searching trial registries is a mandatory item in the Cochrane MECIR guidelines, and two registries, the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) and ClinicalTrials.Gov (CTG), are specifically recommended in the Cochrane Handbook of Systematic Reviews of Interventions (Chapter 4). As ICTRP contains records from CTG, a search of both resources will lead to duplicate records.

Automated tools and existing published deduplication methods are not suited to deduplicating registry records as they are based on comparison of fields such as title, author, journal name, year, and other metadata fields that are common to bibliographic records. Some of these fields are not commonly used in registry records, and even fields such as the title can differ across the same trial’s record from various sources.

Methods: This lightning talk will demonstrate the problem, including why software like Covidence fails at detecting duplicates between ICTRP and CTG. We will also present a method for deduplication of registry records in EndNote (desktop) using the unique study ID field as the sole deduplication parameter.

Conclusion: This method is particularly suited for librarians supporting reviews of interventions who have to search multiple resources that contain trials records (CTG, ICTRP, and even Cochrane CENTRAL).

Background: UBC is the only academic institution in British Columbia that provides accredited master's degrees for rehabilitation professionals in Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Audiology and Speech Sciences. British Columbia is struggling with a shortage of rehabilitation professionals, leading to the expansion of UBC’s rehabilitation programs to satellite sites in Surrey, Prince George, and Victoria (Health Sciences Association of British Columbia, 2021).

Case Presentation: UBC Library has adopted a distributed model of librarianship to match this distributed education model. The model was developed by librarians who support UBC’s distributed Undergraduate Medicine program, but it has only been adopted by rehabilitation sciences within the last five years. In practice, our model consists of one coordinating librarian who supports the Vancouver cohort of each program and oversees the coordination of teaching, collections, and resource development for the entire program. Each distributed site has its own on-site librarian who supports their cohort as one part of their multi-faceted roles.

Conclusions: This presentation will describe our model of library support for UBC’s continually developing rehabilitation programs. We will outline the benefits of the model, including improving the learning experience for students through onsite teaching, reducing the burden of keeping up with program expansions, and bringing multiple perspectives into our work. We will also discuss challenges that we have faced, such as coordination with instructors at multiple sites and technical issues with hybrid teaching. Though this model is not without its challenges, it is nevertheless a novel way to ensure that all students in these distributed programs have equitable access to library support.

Reference:

Health Sciences Association of British Columbia. (2021, October). ‘We’re chronically understaffed’: A report on public rehabilitative healthcare in BC. https://hsabc.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/hsa-chronically-understaffed-exec-summary-for-web.pdf

Objective: To describe a new process model of study identification specifically for randomized studies in systematic reviews of intervention effect.
Methods: Identification of studies is a critical step in the conduct of systematic reviews of effectiveness. The prevailing approach to study identification in systematic reviews, referred to as ‘The Conventional Approach,’ (Cooper et al., 2018) prioritizes bibliographic database searching as the primary method of study identification, followed by searches of grey literature including registers and conferences, and supplementary search methods. Studies and study reports identified by all of these methods are then pooled for study selection.
A new process model is proposed which separates the search for studies from the search for study reports, into distinct phases. We distinguish here between studies and study reports, the former being the focus of the first phase in this process model.
Results: The proposed three phase process model will be described and illustrated. The implications of early study identification in phase one, on the subsequent bibliographic database search in phase two, will be highlighted.
Conclusions: This new process model is an alternate to The Conventional Approach of study identification for use in complicated systematic reviews of intervention effectiveness.

References;
Cooper C, Booth A, Varley-Campbell J, Britten N, Garside R. Defining the process to literature searching in systematic reviews: a literature review of guidance and supporting studies. BMC Medical Research Methodology 2018;18(1)

Background: We are undertaking a Cochrane review evaluating the effect of supplementary search methods compared to bibliographic searching to identify randomised studies.
Cochrane requires an appraisal of the risk of bias of studies included in their systematic reviews. The standard tool recommended by Cochrane (RoB 2) covers interventions evaluated in randomised studies. This ‘type’ of study does not align with the information retrieval studies we anticipate finding (comparative case studies), so we designed our own risk of bias tool specific to information retrieval (IR) studies.

Methods: We undertook a review of the following risk of bias tools identified via the Latitudes website.(1) The aim of the review was to determine the applicability of these tools to IR studies:
• RoB 2
• EPOC – suggested risk of bias criteria for EPOC reviews [proposed criteria for RCTs, non-RCT, and controlled before-after]
• ROBIS
• Newcastle-Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale Case Control Studies
• Scale for the Assessment of Narrative Review Articles (SANRA)

This review was then supplemented by a methodological review by Tomlinson and colleagues who evaluated common challenges and suggestions for risk of bias tool development.(2)

Results: Our proposed tool has three domains: review of study protocol, the comparison, and outcomes. We provide guidance on how to judge risk of bias, adopting the signalling questions from the ROBIS tool.

Conclusions: This is the first tool to appraise risk of bias in IR studies. We will report the tool in full for the first time, providing a worked example of the tool and findings.

References;

1. LATITUDES Network. LATITUDES Network. 2017. URL: https://www.latitudes-network.org/about/ (Accessed September 2024).

2. Tomlinson E, Cooper C, Davenport C, Rutjes AWS, Leeflang M, Mallett S, et al. Common challenges and suggestions for risk of bias tool development: a systematic review of methodological studies. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2024;171111370