Get Credit for Your Searches: Our Experience Using searchRxiv

Abstract

Librarians build detailed search strategies for evidence syntheses enabling the comprehensive retrieval of studies while taking care that no relevant studies are missed. However, this work may be wasted or lost if the review does not reach publication or if the search strategies are not included with the publication. Further, search strategies that are stored in article appendices may not be preserved in the long-term. To address these problems, in 2022 we started depositing search strategies that we developed for evidence syntheses to a new repository called searchRxiv (pronounced “search archive”). SeachRxiv is an open repository established by CABI Digital Library to support information professionals in reporting, sharing, re-using and preserving their search strategies. In this presentation, we will share our experience with searchRxiv, including the advantages and challenges of sharing search strategies as individual research products separate from reviews. For each challenge, we will share our lessons learned and solutions developed, including a template for uploading multiple searches at a time and an approach to adding search strategies to CVs and digital scholarly profiles. We will also share pros and cons to using searchRxiv as opposed to an institutional repository. Despite challenges we have encountered, since 2022 we have been able to openly share 59 search strategies from 13 evidence syntheses using searchRxiv. Overall, we find searchRxiv to be a scalable approach for highlighting the unique contributions of librarians to evidence syntheses beyond publications, and for enabling re-use and reproducibility of our searches.