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Lane Medical Library

Literature Search Service

Service Overview

We offer help with literature reviews of a systematic nature to current members of the Stanford Medicine community. The project lead and point-of-contact to Lane Library must be a Stanford affiliate.

To get started, please complete our request form.

Literature Search Request Form

Review Types

Our librarians can help you with your search strategy creation for any type of review or project, including but not limited to:

  • Systematic Review
  • Scoping Review
  • Literature Review for Grant Application
  • Thesis or Dissertation
  • Course Assignment
  • Book Chapter
  • Thesis Report

Curious about the differences between review types? Check out our guide on the six most comment types of reviews.

Timeline

After completing the literature search request form, you can expect to get a response within two business days about next steps.

Due to the in-depth and time-intensive nature of this work, we can only work on a limited number of reviews simultaneously. If we are at capacity, your request will enter our queue and we will communicate with you about the estimated start date.

If you are working on evidence systematic or scoping review, we highly recommend that you begin a protocol. Consult our Systematic Review Guide for more information about developing and registering a protocol.

Service Tiers

In an effort to provide the highest levels of service and quality to the entire community, we offer three service tiers based on librarian authorship.
Service Level
Librarian Authorship
Deliverables
Work (average)
Tier One
Acknowledgment
  1. Initial Meeting
  2. Help to determine review type
  3. Develop a PubMed search strategy
  4. Identify and suggest other databases to extend search
  5. Advise on citation management and article appraisal tools
3 hours
Tier 2
Co-authorship
Tier One plus:
  1. Translate the searches into other databases
  2. Set-up automated database search alerts
  3. Provide guidance on searching the grey literature and/or hand searching
  4. Writing of the methods section and search strategy
3-10 hours
Tier 3
Co-authorship
Tier One & Two plus one or more of:
  1. Collaboration at a national/international level conference or on a national-level guideline
  2. More in-depth collaboration on additional parts of the project (e.g., writing other parts of the manuscript, providing additional input/support with the systematic review process, etc.)
  3. Recommend tools for journal submission selection
  4. Advise on compliance with NIH Public Access Policy
10+ hours

Instructional Guides

We provide training and guidance review methodology to improve your literature review process. Explore the guides below to learn more.

Project Management Software

We recommend using Covidence software to manage your evidence synthesis project.

 Improve the efficiency of your systematic or scoping reviews with this online tool to streamline the evidence synthesis process. Register with a stanford.edu, stanfordhealthcare.org or stanfordchildrens.org email account.

Access Covidence