About Systematic Search Practice Sets

Background & Rationale

We've consistently heard from participants of our systematic review workshop Links to an external site. that creating search strategies and then testing them against expected set of papers, which is a major activity in the workshop, is a valuable method of improving search skills. 

We also know from feedback associated with the MLA Systematic Review Caucus Links to an external site. that search workshops are great, but provide participants with few opportunities to practice searching in an asynchronous way. 

This project seeks to address this need by providing searchers with a series of practice sets based on published systematic reviews. The practice sets allow users to create their own search strategies, and then test those strategies against the set of articles known to be relevant. This provides searchers with immediate feedback!

Each Practice Set includes:

• A review topic pulled from a published, open access systematic review (or other review design)
• A citation list of all the included studies, with three provided upfront to help with the search (thus mimicking the real-world experience of a PI providing you with a set of highly relevant articles)
• A list of searches to retrieve all included studies in several citation databases, so you can test your search against the set of studies included in the published review

Audience

Level: Intermediate. Users should have some training, formal or informal, in advanced database searching, and a basic understanding of systematic review methodology.

This site is intended to provide a space for librarians and other search professionals to practice developing searches in a safe and non-pressure environment.

While the site was not developed for curricular or student use, the practice sets can be downloaded and adapted for those purposes. Specifically, the content could be useful to instructors who want to give students an opportunity to develop systematic search skills in a educational setting.