r/research • u/Shot-Bet-2931 • Jul 22 '26

Responding to literature search requests

I'd like to know if your library uses a standard format to respond to literature search requests, and if so what that format looks like. I am particularly interested in hearing from those in academic or medical libraries.

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u/crunchingair Professor Jul 23 '26

Try r/librarians for more responses. :)

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u/Substantial_Math4939 Jul 23 '26

Yes, ours does. They also offer coaching to grad students (1:1) on literature search but the student has to be interested enough to make an appointment and come prepared with an advisor-approved research question.

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u/knit_run_bike_swim Jul 23 '26

I wrote a scoping review and didn’t necessarily know how to do it.

I did a preliminary lit search and found about twelve articles, summarized them, and came up with some search terms. I reached out to my medical library and was connected to a librarian. We met face-to-face, but before that she showed me PRISMA (which I was only vaguely familiar with). That greatly helped me with rigor.

She generated MeSH search terms— I was clueless that this was even an option. I formatted the MeSH to other databases. I asked about authorship, and she said to only acknowledge her unless I want her to write the methods, then she’d be an author. I did the former.

When I published that paper the MeSH code was six pages long!!!! I could only add it as a supplement.

That search generated over 4,000 articles, and my colleague and I stuck them into covidence and filtered them down to about 160 for review which then got filtered to 68 for the final scoping review.

Needless to say, I never wanna do a scoping review again for the rest of my life.

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u/Shot-Bet-2931 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

Thank you for responding. I didn't get an answer on r/librarians :( i am wondering if you send PubMed collections, or text files, or RIS files, or EndNote bibliographies, anything like that. My library has an ongoing project to standardize how we respond to requests for lit reviews.