The Library offers knowledge synthesis services to members of the University of Ottawa community, including students, faculty members, researchers, and staff in health sciences and medicine. With an increase in the number of requests for knowledge synthesis services involving librarians over the last several years, guidelines have been implemented to ensure that expectations of both researcher(s) and librarian(s) are met. There is no cost for these services.
Services for students (undergraduate students, graduate students, and residents)
With a strong dedication to enriching the student experience at the University of Ottawa, the Library firmly believes in teaching students the skills needed to enhance their research, leading towards independent researchers. Students can book an individual consultation for knowledge synthesis projects with the Research Librarian for their discipline.
Services for faculty members and researchers
Tiered Service Model (Faculty Only)
| Acknowledgement (Tier 1) | Co-authorship (Tier 2) |
|---|---|
|
|
The Library is pleased to work collaboratively with faculty members and researchers on all types of knowledge synthesis reviews, and can contribute expertise as follows:
- Consultation and guidance for developing search strategies.
- Creation, development, and execution of search strategies.
- Consultation and support with citation managers and library-supported systematic review software, including importing and exporting from databases, and removing duplicates.
- Consultation and support for searching the grey literature.
Faculty members will be required to fill out the Knowledge Synthesis Service Level Agreement.
Principal Investigators requesting the collaboration of a librarian will:
- Fill out the consultation request form.
- Extend authorship rights to the librarian based upon criteria provided in the Tiered Service Model, in accordance with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) for defining the roles and responsibilities of authors and contributors.
- Assemble the research team prior to meeting with the librarian.
- Provide the librarian a draft of their protocol prior to meeting with the librarian.
- Provide the librarian with key citations for their review prior to meeting with the librarian.
The following services are not provided:
- Data entry or editing.
- Data clean-up, data verification or analysis.
- Screening for title/abstract or full-text articles.
- Execution of searching the grey literature.
- Article retrieval in any format.
What projects are eligible for this service?
| Eligible projects | Not eligible projects |
|---|---|
Projects must be faculty-led projects, and can be:
| The following projects are not eligible:
|
Disclaimers
Requests for literature search support are provided on a first come, first served basis, and are subject to librarian availability. Due to the in-depth and time-intensive nature of this work, requests may be put on a waitlist. The Library staff in health sciences and medicine will discuss timelines and delivery dates before any work commences.
As projects evolve, the librarian retains the right to change tiers to accurately reflect the nature of the work being conducted, and to refuse co-authorship. Upon publication of the article, the acknowledged or co-author librarian will be provided with a copy of the published manuscript.