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.

Objectives

With more Canadian librarians depositing their knowledge synthesis search data into institutional data repositories within the Canadian Dataverse, Borealis, there is a growing need to streamline access to search strategies deposited by librarians at different institutions. Currently, search functionality works best at the individual institutional level within Borealis, making it difficult to access a range of search strategies on a particular topic. We set out to create a federated search within librarian search deposits across participating institutions in Borealis.

Methods

Since manipulating the advanced search features within Borealis is limited, the authors identified Google Sites to create a canned search within Borealis for librarian-created knowledge synthesis search strategies across various institutional dataverses. The search box allows librarians to search by topic within deposited search datasets. By doing so, the authors have engineered an efficient method to identify potentially relevant search strategies deposited by Canadian librarians.

Discussion

Using or adapting knowledge synthesis searches, with appropriate credit, by other Canadian librarians is a useful way to eliminate time spent creating individual search strategies. Current Borealis functionality creates a barrier to the discovery of deposited datasets, and this canned search removes this barrier by offering one place for librarians to find potentially useful searches. By allowing librarians to easily access and adapt published search strategies from Canadian colleagues for their own knowledge synthesis projects, librarians can tap into each other’s knowledge and learn from one another.