Submitting a Practice Set

Help us build our library of Practice Sets!

You don't need to be a systematic search or evidence synthesis expert to contribute to the site. There are only a few rules we use when selecting studies to base our search sets off of, and they're easy to follow!

To be the foundation of a Practice Set, an article needs to:

  • Be available Open Access, free of charge
  • Have its citation in Pubmed or Pubmed Central
  • Be a type of evidence synthesis that requires a systematic search (systematic review, scoping review, rapid review, etc)
  • Have at least ten studies included in the final synthesis/analysis (last box of the PRIMSA flow chart)

The reviews don't need to include great searches (or even any searches at all!), and they don't need to be gold standard examples of proper methodology. For the purposes of creating and testing searches, it's more important to have a reasonably clear set of concepts and a good number of included studies to test searches against.

You may wander across papers that would be good Practice Set foundational articles, or you can go out and find them! The easiest way to find potential reviews is to search Pubmed for a topic, and apply the following filters:

  • Free Full Text
  • Systematic Review (and/or Meta-Analysis).

Then, skim the abstracts to see how many studies are included in the final synthesis, and select anything that looks relevant and includes at least 10 studies:

Image shows results from a Pubmed search on Marfan Syndrome, limited to Free Full Text and Systematic Review.

Once you've identified a potential review, you can submit it for consideration. We need the following information to consider a review:

  • A topic statement or the research question of the review
  • The review's PMID (Pubmed ID)
  • The PMIDs for all of the 10+ included studies (yes, this is the hardest part! look for a table or supplement where all included citations are listed)

Got all of your information ready? Great! Submit it using the Qualtrics form below:

Practice Set Review Submission Links to an external site.

After you've submitted the form, we'll take it from there. Our team will review the submission and consider the clarity of the search concepts and the availability of the included studies in commonly used databases. We'll format the Topic and Key files, create and test the included study search strategies, make any necessary notes on the files, and upload to the site if all is approved!

Please note that submitting a review for consideration as a Practice Set does not guarantee its inclusion. This is an unfunded project, and the submission review team will process what they can when they can. Thank you for your understanding!

Questions? Want to talk more? Contact Whitney Townsend at whitneyt@umich.edu