Objectives

By viewing knowledge synthesis (KS) searches as code and depositing them into data repositories, librarians assert their intellectual control over their work, ensuring that the search strategies are properly reported and presented as stand-alone intellectual outputs. To better understand how to support these initiatives, the authors investigated Canadian health sciences librarians’ attitudes and behaviours regarding the documentation and sharing of KS search strategies.

Methods

We invited 498 people to a bilingual 15-minute survey if they were listed as a health sciences librarian or information specialist on public websites of academic, hospital, government, or special libraries in Canada.

Results

128 complete responses were received for a 25.7% response rate. 84% of respondents agreed that search strategies and their related output files are equivalent to research data and code for a KS publication, but only about 30% have deposited search strategies in a data or institutional repository. 85% have used or adapted an existing search strategy in the creation of a new strategy. The results also show that intellectual control of co-authored search strategies is salient among participants and that there is broad interest in integrating research data management (RDM) best practices into KS work.

Conclusions

The results suggest that Canadian librarians recognize their work as independent data; however, there are no formal guidelines to ensure that librarians integrate search deposits into their KS workflows. Our findings can be used to advance the open sharing of search strategies among Canadian librarians, aligning with PRISMA-S, and encourage librarians' continuous engagement as participants in the RDM ecosystem.