I’ve been interested in taking a systematic review workshop for the past two or three years, since my previous library discussed starting a formal systematic review service. This year, I was finally able to attend a virtual workshop organized by the Cornell University Library, “Systematic Reviews and Evidence Synthesis Beyond the Health Sciences: A Training for Librarians“. This three-day workshop covered the entire systematic review process, from question development to publication.

I was especially motivated to attend this workshop because my work for the past year has been conducting scoping and rapid reviews on health and health policy topics. I’ve done a lot of on-the-job learning in this position and have been fairly successful in developing my skills in that way; however, I was eager to undergo some more formal training to ensure that I was doing my job correctly and to find out if I could be doing things more effectively.

Overall, I found the workshop to be enjoyable and helpful. I was gratified to find out that most of what I’ve been doing for the last year was in line with established best practices, and I feel a lot more confident in myself as an evidence synthesis librarian. I left the workshop feeling inspired to review my workflows for scoping and rapid reviews and look for areas where the process could be made more consistent and transparent. I would definitely recommend this workshop to librarians who are interested in learning about the systematic review process, especially those who are new to this type of research.