Literature Searching Support

Galter Library provides comprehensive support for literature searches, systematic reviews, and scoping reviews. We recommend consulting a librarian at the outset of your project to ensure comprehensiveness and reproducibility.

We offer free consultations, hands-on training, and collaborative opportunities. Visit Find My Librarian to locate the liaison for your department, center or program.

General Literature Review Support

Liaison Librarians provide expert search assistance to faculty, staff and students to support patient care, research projects, presentations and more. To get started:

Systematic & Scoping Review Support

Consult Model

A librarian provides guidance and training while the team leads the review.

Guidance on best practices and literature.
Broad search strategy design (database selection).
Training on advanced database searching.
Consultation on citation management (e.g., EndNote).

Collaboration Model

A librarian joins your team as a core collaborator to:

Formulate research questions and protocol methods.
Develop and execute sensitive search strategies using appropriate databases and search filters.
Deliver de-duplicated results for platforms like Covidence or Rayyan.
Assist with full-text retrieval and PRISMA flow diagram data.
Write the search methodology and review the manuscript.

Authorship & Effort

Librarians collaborating on reviews commonly satisfy the authorship criteria set forth by ICMJE. Co-authorship is expected for the Collaboration Model. For grant proposals, please discuss the appropriate allocation of effort and include the librarian as a co-investigator.

Request Systematic or Scoping Review Support

Key Resources

Eligibility: Services are available to Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine faculty, students and staff. Students/faculty from other schools should contact their respective libraries. Galter Library cannot collaborate on practice guidelines or research syntheses for outside professional organizations.