Medicine Liaison Librarians are available to meet with students to help with:
- Systematic and scoping reviews
- Literature searching strategies and techniques
- Follow-up meetings to continue your research support
Before booking, please read the description of each consultation type carefully to understand what our librarians can and can't provide, and to check if any preparation is required before your appointment.
Select a service now to schedule your personalized consultation.
Consultations for students
How librarians can support your review
For all students (UG, PG and PhD) where the review project is part of your dissertation, thesis or coursework, librarians are available for consultation on the following aspects of systematic and scoping reviews:
- Formulating a suitable research question
- Providing resources to answer other questions about the review process
- Checking for published or in-process reviews on the same topic
- Designing and building the search strategy (including syntax, keywords, subject headings, filters, etc.)
- Searching grey literature (your librarian may be able to suggest suitable sources and provide guidance on how to search these sources)
- Advising on reference management, deduplication and screening, using products like EndNote and Covidence to support these processes
- Review methods reporting with the PRISMA flow diagrams and checklists.
Additional help may be available on a case-by-case basis.
The service is designed to support you in conducting your review. Librarians will not design search strategies or do searches for you.
Before you book a consultation
To learn the advanced database search techniques required for evidence synthesis you should review our Literature searching tutorial and Systematic reviews - Searching tutorial and read our Systematic review guide.
When you receive your booking confirmation email you'll be asked to share the following types of information or submit a draft protocol, so before you book please ensure you are at a stage in your project where you have developed a draft of your:
- research question
- search strategy
Consultations
Consultations are held online on Microsoft Teams and are 50 minutes long.
If you've previously booked a systematic/scoping review consultation and have further questions please email lib-med-liaison@imperial.ac.uk for quick questions or book a follow-up meeting.
If you need advice on literature searching in databases or finding grey literature (not as part of a systematic/scoping review) you can book a consultation with a librarian to discuss any questions or issues.
These meetings are not designed to teach you literature searching.
Before you book your consultation you should complete the Literature searching tutorial so you are familiar with advanced database searching techniques. This interactive tutorial guides you through the process using databases to search for academic literature; from creating your research question and search strategy, to searching a variety of databases and exporting and managing the results you find.
The 50 minute meeting will be held online on Microsoft Teams.
For shorter questions that may not need a meeting to answer, email lib-med-liaison@imperial.ac.uk
If you have already had a previous consultation with a librarian (for example to discuss your literature search, systematic review or scoping review) and have further questions that you wish to discuss, follow-up meetings are available.
Please do not book a follow-up meeting if you have not already had a prior consultation with a librarian.