Characteristics and Impact of Librarian Co-authored Systematic Reviews: A Bibliometric Analysis

BackgroundHealth sciences libraries have been providing services that support systematic reviews (SRs) for many years. In recent times the problem facing health sciences libraries is the management of the demand versus resources availability. There have been questions posed as to the value of this type of service in health sciences libraries. A valuable outcome of librarian collaboration on SR teams is co-authorship of the reported SRs. This study aimed to examine the characteristics and impact of librarian co-authored SRs. MethodsA bibliometric analysis was conducted. Librarian co-authored SRs were identified in the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection limited up to the year 2017. Librarian co-authored SRs with the librarian as first author were excluded from this analysis. Additional inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied in the selection process. The included records were analyzed using Perl programs and VOSviewer. To examine the dissemination of librarian co-authored SRs, citing articles to the included SR records were retrieved from the WOS Core Collection and then identified in MEDLINE for an analysis of the indexed publication types. ResultsThe included results yielded 1,711 librarian co-authored SRs published between 1996 and 2017. The top three countries of the first author affiliation were USA, Canada, and Netherlands. Sources of publication were distributed among 730 journal titles. The number of MEDLINE citing articles to the included SRs was 28,868. The mean number of citations to a SR was 26.4. The top publication type descriptor of the citing articles representing the MEDLINE "Study Characteristic" category was "Randomized Controlled Trial". ConclusionOutcomes of librarian contributions to supporting SRs include increasing scholarship opportunities that highlight librarian contributions to other disciplines. SRs are bodies of evidence, which can influence policy, patient care, and future research. In this study, we demonstrate that librarian co-authored SRs are disseminated into randomized controlled trials and other study types, meta-analyses, as well as guidelines, thus providing insight into knowledge transfer and the potential for clinical implementation.