Understanding our impact: Analyzing librarian involvement with systematic reviews

Abstract

Objectives: On a medical campus, systematic reviews with librarian co-authors compared to reviews without librarians were published in journals with lower impact factors, although still within the comparative range. To try to determine why, discipline and authors’ publishing experience were examined. The bibliographic analysis was also expanded to see if there is a difference in the journal ranks by discipline.

Methods: Search strategies were created to pull systematic reviews published in the last five years by campus authors from PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE, and Web of Science. Citations were exported and deduped using EndNote X8. The systematic reviews were grouped by whether a librarian from our campus assisted with the search or not by searching for librarians’ names in the author field. A statistically appropriate number of articles without a librarian author were randomly selected for comparison with articles that had librarian assistance. Selected articles were analyzed based on Journal Impact Factor for the year of publication, journal rank by discipline, authors’ discipline(s), and years of authors’ publication experience. Authors’ years of experience are determined by the date of their first published article.

Results: Systematic reviews with the assistance of a librarian were statistically no different from those without a librarian in terms of the Journal Impact Factor or journal rank by discipline where systematic reviews were published. Years of experience significantly differed between groups, with librarians assisting most authors with 5 years or fewer of experience. The departments who utilized librarians for systematic searching the most were: General Medicine, Orthopedics, and Gastroenterology.

Conclusions: This exploratory research helped evaluate who our librarians are primarily working with on systematic reviews. It also informed us that we do not have an impact on the systematic review being published in a higher impact journal based on Journal Impact Factor or rank by discipline. Our liaison efforts will focus less on the three departments listed above as they already utilize our service. Since most of the authors we assisted had 5 years of experience, we will target the campus faculty onboarding orientation.