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In-Person Help:
- Time: Monday to Friday: 10am – 4pm
- Location: Joseph S. Stauffer Library, 2nd Floor – Room 212
Email:
- Send your question via email and we’ll respond within 24 hours, Monday through Friday
Consult:
Make an appointment with a librarian to get research help in person or via Teams or Zoom.
- Select from the list of subject specialists or make an appointment using LibCal
AskUs:
In addition to in-person research help, chat and text message assistance is available by using the library’s AskUs service
Knowledge Synthesis Support in the Humanities, Business, and Social Sciences
- Librarians will meet with research teams and current faculty to offer search strategy guidance.
- Librarians provide training to researchers about the development of comprehensive search strategies, including identifying appropriate databases and relevant tools.
- Pending the librarian’s workload, they will consider joining a scoping or systematic review project team if the project goal is publication that requires a published search strategy as recommended by Cochrane, JBI (Joanna Briggs Institute), CIHR, etc. In doing so, the librarian’s expertise should be recognized through an offer of co-authorship though the librarian is under no obligation to accept co-authorship.
- It is highly recommended that a protocol should be emailed to the subject specialist librarian before meeting with them. Please note that librarians will not participate in screening or article retrieval.
- Graded Student Coursework and Special Projects:
- Librarians will provide help with search strategy development unless the searches are part of a graded assignment required for a course.
- Systematic Reviews as part of a Thesis and Dissertation:
- We recognize the number of knowledge synthesis projects that are pursued as part of theses and dissertations in humanities and social sciences departments are on the rise.
- Should workload permit it, a librarian may join the research team for a systematic or scoping review if (1) the faculty supervisor agrees; and (2) there is intent to publish the thesis or dissertation with the search strategy included.