Enhancing the role of academic librarians in conducting scoping reviews

TL;DR

This paper explores how academic librarians can leverage bibliometric analysis and mapping tools to enhance the process of conducting scoping reviews, especially when manual literature analysis is impractical.

Contribution

It introduces the use of bibliometric mapping software to visualize and chart literature content, expanding librarians' roles in scoping reviews beyond systematic reviews.

Findings

Bibliometric mapping effectively visualizes literature landscapes.

Science landscapes assist in decision-making during scoping reviews.

Librarians can employ these tools to improve review comprehensiveness.

Abstract

Information exposing, in conjunction with technological innovations and the emergence of social media, altered the traditional roles of academic libraries and enabled librarians to become necessary partners in research. The role of academic librarians in conducting systematic reviews is well recognised, however, their role in conducting scoping reviews is not yet well established. Nevertheless, we propose that, in more and more frequent situations when it is not feasible to read and analyse all relevant literature to be scoped manually, librarians employ bibliometric analysis and mapping to visualise and chart literature content. Our study demonstrated that science landscapes induced automatically by bibliometric mapping software could serve as a tool to visualise and chart the content of relevant literature when conducting the fourth step of scoping reviews. Additionaly science landscapes can help also serve to help improve the decision strategies when conducting scoping reviews. Keywords: Scoping