Who's doing systematic reviews?: A descriptive analysis

Abstract

Background: Over the past few decades systematic reviews have become a major component of the biomedical research literature landscape. While systematic reviews were originally developed for medicine and its related fields, they are increasingly published in other disciplines. Our research questions are,“What disciplines outside of the health sciences are adopting systematic reviews as a research method? What implications may this have for health sciences librarianship?”

Objective: Our initial goal is to broadly investigate and describe the non-health science subject areas and disciplines that are publishing systematic reviews. We will look at the infiltration of systematic reviews into other fields and consider the implications of our results for health science librarians as well as librarians in other disciplines. Based on our initial findings, we will propose avenues for future research.

Methods: We conducted a search in the Scopus database as a representative sample of research literature. We searched for the phrase “systematic review*” in the article title or abstract, and limited the results to review articles from journals. We filtered out articles published in health sciences disciplines using the Scopus subject categories, and examined the articles that remained. The resulting set of titles was screened by two independent reviewers in a stepwise fashion, first by reading titles, then abstracts, then the full text of remaining articles. We screened the citations to determine if each was a systematic review and addressed a topic outside the clinical health sciences. We read each remaining article to determine its subject area. Our initial results include systematic reviews outside the health science disciplines, and will yield data that has implications for librarians in the health sciences and in disciplines outside the health science field.