The Methodological Maze: Creating a Workshop on the Process of Conducting a Scoping or Systematic Review

Background: As the desire to conduct comprehensive knowledge synthesis projects such as systematic and scoping reviews continues to grow, librarians are called upon to provide support to researchers who are often unaware of the complexities of these reviews. Librarians are therefore positioned to be methodological experts, providing more than just search strategy development support.

Librarians must continue to evolve both in content and instructional design of workshops to reflect the changing landscape of review methodologies. We have implemented intentional pedagogical choices to maximize our response to the current needs of medical researchers.

Description: Designed for both students and faculty, our workshop guides participants through the entire review process, from question development to publication. Competencies and resources are identified (but not explicitly taught) throughout the workshop so participants gain an understanding of the review process and skills required to be successful.

Crucially, the workshop highlights the methodological differences between scoping and systematic reviews; key differences that are not always clear to researchers, which can have significant effects on the process and success of the project.

This presentation will provide an overview of the workshop structure, discuss our instructional design process using a structure which pointedly highlights the methodological differences between scoping and systematic reviews, and presents the in-workshop tools that were developed specifically for participants. This presentation will enable participants to adapt our format to address their unique scoping and/or systematic review instruction challenges.

Conclusion: Our assessment of the workshop has been iterative and ongoing. From colleague feedback, we expanded the scoping review content of our workshop. In the workshop itself, we received comments from participants expressing appreciation of the clarity of the methodologies we present in class. Moreover, we continue to actively collect feedback; part of being a good educator is consistently adapting and responding to learners developing and ongoing skillsets. As we look to the future and these methodologies continue to change, we believe this kind of multimodal workshop will come to take a permanent place in the research activities of scholars.