1 - A Decade of Systematic Reviews: A Quantitative Look at the Weill Cornell Medicine Experience

BACKGROUND The Weill Cornell Medicine Samuel J. Wood Library’s systematic review (SR) service began in 2011, with 2021 marking a decade of service. The service started with one trained SR librarian and two requests in its first year and has expanded to a team of eight SR librarians tackling 60 requests in 2021. This abstract aims to examine how the service has grown and break down our service quantitatively using data over the past 11 years to examine SR timelines and trends.

DESCRIPTION The authors evaluated 11 years (2011-2021) of SR request data from our in-house documentation. In total, there have been 313 SR requests from 20 departments, leading to 101 publications with at least one librarian collaborator listed as coauthor. Twenty-seven of these published papers have received at least 20 citations; the most highly cited SR received 820 citations since its 2014 publication. Based on our SR teams’ documentation data, we can report on the following: [1] Longest (1400 days)/shortest (129)/average (602) time to publication; [2] requests from repeat SR teams were twice as likely to get published; [3] teams with 3 members were most likely to get published; [4] SR projects are most likely to be abandoned at the title/abstract screening phase; [5] librarians spent an average of 13.7 hours in total on each review, 17.9 hours average on each published review. 

CONCLUSIONS The SR service has seen a steadily increasing demand since its inception in 2011. Aided by external/internal training opportunities, the service now supports a variety of review types including scoping, rapid, guidelines and consensus statements. This data will allow us to better understand and address issues regarding completion, librarian time/work allocation, and request patterns. While each user population is unique, other SR services can hopefully use this data to inform their own workflows as well.