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Collaborative Endeavors: A Team Perspective on Co-authoring
Systematic Reviews with Medical Students

Megan DeArmond, MSLIS, MFAa, Sherli Koshy-Chenthittayil, PhDb, Amy EL Stone, PhDc

aAssociate Professor/Systematic Review Services Librarian, Jay Sexter Library, Touro
University Nevada, Henderson, Nevada, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7048-1039 ,
mde_armo@touro.edu

bData Analyst, Office of Institutional Effectiveness, Touro University Nevada, Henderson,
Nevada, https://www.orcid.org/0000-0002-1054-455X , skoshy-c@touro.edu

cAssistant Professor of Medical Education, Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine, University of
Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada, https://www.orcid.org/0000-0002-9140-6510 ,
amy.stone@unlv.edu

Cite as: DeArmond M, Koshy-Chenthittayil S, and Stone AEL. Collaborative Endeavors: A
Team Perspective on Co-authoring Systematic Reviews with Medical Students. Hypothesis.
2025;37(2). doi:10.18060/28386

DeArmond, Koshy-Chenthittayil, Stone. All works in Hypothesis are
licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.
Authors own copyright of their articles appearing in Hypothesis. Readers may copy articles
without permission of the copyright owner(s), as long as the author(s) are acknowledged in
the copy, and the copy is used for educational, not-for-profit purposes. For any other use of
articles, please contact the copyright owner(s).

1

https://www.orcid.org/0000-0001-7048-1039
https://orcid.org/
mailto:mde_armo@touro.edu 
https://www.orcid.org/0000-0002-1054-455X
https://orcid.org/
mailto:skoshy-c@touro.edu
https://www.orcid.org/0000-0002-9140-6510
https://orcid.org/
mailto:amy.stone@unlv.edu
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/


Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2025

Abstract
Introduction: Evidence synthesis (ES) projects have been on the rise, providing a way to
work collaboratively without needing to use a lab or meet in person. ES projects are a good
method for all involved to learn more about the subject, to foster meaningful collaborations
among team members, and to establish and improve mentoring skills. The authors
conceptualized, formulated, drafted, and published a diagnostic accuracy systematic review
on rapid antigen tests used to detect COVID-19. During the review, varied challenges arose,
many unanticipated. To address them the authors and team members developed effective
strategies that may benefit future ES projects.

Experience: The article describes the experiences of the varied team members, which
included medical students, a librarian, faculty, and a data analyst. The article addresses the
collaborative process including defining roles and responsibilities. Next, the authors describe
laying the foundation of the project so that as team members were recruited, the project
flowed smoothly. The team then reflects on the management of the project over multiple
years. As with many ES projects, the protocol needed to be revised, and the authors share
their approach to these changes.

Discussion: The librarian’s collaboration with both students and faculty members yielded
significant benefits, including improved mentoring skills, enhanced team coordination, and
diverse perspectives gained through interdisciplinary collaboration. The challenges faced by
navigating the literature landscape and managing the team are also described.

Takeaways: Librarians are in a unique position to advocate for multi-disciplinary teams,
incorporating a data analyst early on, and judiciously using software in evidence synthesis
projects. These projects help build the backbone of medical literature.

Introduction
There has been an uptick in publishing evidence synthesis projects such as systematic and
scoping reviews1, particularly since the start of the pandemic in 2020, as evidenced by a
search for the phrase ‘systematic review’ in the record titles in PubMed, which showed
73,559 results from 2015-2019 and 165,216 from 2020-2025. Similarly, the search for the
phrase “scoping review” in PubMed, showed 3,455 results for 2015-2019 and 25,406 for
2020-2025, (the search was conducted on Jan 15, 2025). Evidence synthesis (ES) projects
provide an avenue for students and faculty to publish, for mentorship (student/faculty,
student/student, and faculty/faculty), and for all involved to learn more about the process of
and participation on a team project. In a recent effort to write a systematic review on the
diagnostic accuracy of rapid antigen tests for COVID-19 detection (full review published in
Oct 20242; protocol published in 20213) a range of challenges were encountered, many of
which were unanticipated, such as issues with published studies, challenges coordinating and
training a large group, and deciding how to organize files and tasks. The authors developed
methods to streamline the work that they feel may benefit a larger group. The faculty (six in
total) on the team coordinated a large group (11 in total) of osteopathic medical students to
complete this project. The methods used to keep the project moving forward included
dedicated work time, piloting each step of the process, and assigning students specific
numbers of papers to review. Additionally, the team used collaborative spreadsheets with

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Google applications (Alphabet, Inc). Here, we present some challenges of completing a
systematic review of diagnostic test accuracy and some tips and tricks for mentoring a large
group of students.

Systematic reviews offer a rigorous research methodology that contributes to improving
practices and institutional research footprints. The cost of foundational science, translational,
and clinical research continues to increase due to the cost and access to reagents, equipment,
and specialized facilities. While the cost of journal subscriptions and article access continues
to rise, the material costs for systematic reviews remain lower than lab or field-based
biomedical research. This lower material cost is useful for institutions with more research
demand than facilities.

In addition to material costs, faculty time and expertise are critical resources. The human
power (personnel hours) needed to complete an evidence synthesis project is similar to, if not
more than, foundational, translational or clinical research but without requiring reagents,
equipment, and specialized facilities. However, training faculty members in systematic review
methodology can exponentially increase the number of people capable of doing systematic
reviews as they continue instructing trainees (students, residents, fellows). While training
doesn’t ensure high-quality research products, as is seen across many different fields,
collaborations with library faculty can increase the integrity of evidence synthesis projects.

These aspects of resource investment and the potential amplification of initial training and
skills make systematic reviews an option to help meet research demand. Institutions
considering adding evidence synthesis projects to their research portfolio must consider
training, labor, software, and article access before embarking on such endeavors.

Experiences
The Collaborative Process: Establishing roles and responsibilities
Librarian expertise in information sciences

Librarian expertise can be both broad and in-depth on evidence synthesis projects. This
review didn’t require any conceptualizing or brainstorming related to the research question,
but often, this is something librarians can do in a team meeting when assisting with searching
for existing reviews and studies on a topic to help shape and direct the research question for
evidence synthesis. Our team had a clear question in the PIRD (population, index test,
reference test, diagnosis of interest) framework, often used in diagnostic accuracy question
development4.

Librarians can competently identify databases and resources appropriate to search for the
research question and are familiar with what is available at their institution and the resources
freely available, including identifying grey literature resources. Developing and implementing
search strategies for all resources is a prominent skill non-librarians think should be the role
of librarians implementing evidence synthesis projects5-7. However, this time-consuming and
valuable part of the project is one aspect of the librarian’s contribution. A librarian colleague
refers to it as developing the data collection instrument since the search strategy determines
the articles to be screened.

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Librarians are skilled and efficient at finding articles. Additionally, librarians know citation
software and can assist and train the team in managing citations using a specified software,
such as EndNote. For our project, this provided an opportunity to train students in article
retrieval and citation management. The collaboration between the methods’ expert (librarian)
and the more accessible subject matter expert (trainees) helped enhance the development of
the search strategy.

Medical students’ clinical insights and research skills

Medical students provide a unique and diverse perspective on clinical topics as they are new
to the field. They benefit from seeing clinical challenges with new eyes since they begin their
journey to become clinicians. Students are more exposed to research methods earlier in their
educational journey than ever before. This shift is driven by the increasingly competitive
environments where trainees and potential trainees need to distinguish themselves from other
applicants at each level of education8,9 (undergraduate medical education and graduate
medical education). Two of the students that the librarian worked closely with mentioned that
the time spent with the librarian helped them in a residency interview and with one or two
board exam questions. This early exposure in their undergraduate careers allows them to
develop and refine their research skill sets before they matriculate into medical school10,11.
Further, the technological and internet literacy many of today’s students have is a clear result
of their lived experiences where the internet and computers have always been available12,13.
These are invaluable skills to leverage as they may be able to develop new techniques and
approaches that utilize technology in innovative ways.

The spectrum of roles for medical students in writing a systematic review can range from data
collection and entry to foundational team members who contribute intellectually and
technically to the entire process. We empowered our student team to explore the range of
potential roles within the project and find where they felt comfortable contributing. A few of
our students stepped up into the foundational team member roles, where the project relied on
their involvement to proceed. For example, one of our earliest students helped write the
protocol as well as piloted the reference deduplication process, the title/abstract screening, the
full-text screening, and the risk of bias process before helping teach the other students on the
team. A different student was content to pull data from the selected articles but did not have
the time to pilot or develop processes for the review. When embarking on a project such as
this, it is important to help students define their roles and responsibilities.

Faculty roles of mentorship, guidance, and content expertise

Depending on the project’s goals, the spectrum of faculty roles can be as broad as those for
medical students. The faculty’s main responsibilities are to promote student learning and
collaboration, including accountability and professionalism, to ensure the integrity of the
research, to ensure equitable treatment of all project team members, and to identify the
needed expertise for the execution of the project.

The faculty members need to take responsibility for the equitable treatment of all members of
the project team. This entails both ensuring that the members know and uphold their
responsibilities (accountability), and that team members interact in respectful ways
(professionalism). These aspects should be specifically detailed in the working agreement

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(see Appendix 1). Some trainees struggle with both aspects and can become unprofessional
when they fail to see the value of multidisciplinary approaches or become overwhelmed with
other activities. It is the faculty members’ responsibility to highlight the value that each team
member brings to the project and emphasize that research is not done in a vacuum but in an
intricate network of expertise and perspectives.

The team recommends using written, living documents as practical advice for faculty
members to handle these roles and responsibilities. These documents are collaboratively
written by the faculty and students that detail the expectations, roles and responsibilities, and
timelines for the project. The team recommends a living document so that updates can be
made as the project or team changes, and the agreements within the document can be revisited
and discussed at each project milestone. Flexibility is a component of professional life and
our agreements and roles within these projects should remain flexible. There are many
different templates of these types of documents available, and the version selected should be
tailored to the project and its personnel. When developing the roles and responsibilities for
this project, the faculty members discussed the project, expectations, and timelines with each
trainee individually and collaborated on desired contribution levels and expectations. In the
end, the final working agreement (Appendix 1) that was collectively agreed upon allowed
accountability, professionalism, and timely project completion.

Data scientists’ roles in project design, and analysis methodology

The data scientist should be incorporated throughout the project with specific roles in three
main stages, the first being the protocol writing stage. They can help identify the type of data
that needs to be collected to answer the review question. For example, in a diagnostic
accuracy review, our data scientist recommended additional data for sub-group analysis
beyond test accuracy values. They can design the data collection instrument so that the
extraction process runs smoothly. For example, we modified our data collection instrument to
use standardized terminology, which helped with the meta-analysis. The second stage is the
data extraction process and meta-analysis. Someone with a statistics background was
essential for these steps of the review. The data analyst helped the team identify papers that
did not report outcomes needed for meta-analysis. Additionally, they made informed
decisions on the types of statistical techniques implemented. For example, due to the high
heterogeneity of the data, the data scientist guided the methodological shifts to the
meta-analysis.

The final stage is data presentation and sharing. The data scientist can ensure that technical
methodology and results are well described in the manuscript. They can also help make data
publicly available on repositories such as GitHub. For our project, they were integral in the
writing and submission of the manuscript.

Laying the foundation of the project

A well-designed ES project starts with a detailed protocol and a librarian-driven
comprehensive search strategy. The protocol drafting and submission was headed up by the
team librarian with assistance from two of the medical students. The medical students began
with the pre-written template from JBI methodology (formerly known as Joanna Briggs
Institute, Adelaide, Australia4) and worked with the librarian to test, refine, and clarify the

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research question, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and the results from the search strategy. In this
step, the librarian served as the main mentor of the students and the project.

The search strings for COVID and for the Rapid Antigen tests were initially drafted by the
librarian and then refined with the help of the students. They quickly learned that there were
validated searches that existed for COVID, which formed the basis for the protocol’s search
strategy. This was tricky since most of the strategy was drafted in 2020, before the
codification of COVID terms. In January 2021, as part of the annual changes in MeSH
(Medical Subject Headings) by the National Library of Medicine, many of the COVID
indexing terms were upgraded from being Supplemental Concepts to being MeSH terms. Due
to this, the search had to be extensively revised with the new MeSH terms. Additionally,
following PRESS (Peer-Review of Electronic Search Strategies) guidelines14 helped give
structure to the search and its revisions.

Managing the project

At its peak, the project had six faculty members and eleven students working on the project
simultaneously. Managing this project required coordination across the faculty and the
students to maintain consistency with individuals and prevent unnecessary redundancies.
Throughout this project, the trainees and faculty were responsible for screening, critical
appraisal, and data extraction. The faculty mentors kept the team on track and revised
timelines as needed. The librarian was more heavily involved in retrieving full-text articles
and screening. The data scientist served as a validator for the data extraction and performed
the meta-analysis. Several strategies contributed to the success of managing this project with
so many individuals.

The number one strategy employed to manage this project was to have a one-hour, optional
but highly recommended, “working” meeting each week. As a team, we would meet virtually
every Monday evening to work for an hour on the project. This provided a dedicated time on
each person’s schedule to contribute to the review, along with a level of accountability.
Additionally, this provided a time to address concerns, inconsistencies, and clarify the tasks of
each step in the review process. The students knew that the faculty would be expecting them
to attend, and the faculty expected each other to be present. The first few minutes of each
meeting were used to review the current tasks, update everyone on the progress of the project,
and address any confusion or concerns. The last few minutes of each meeting were used to
address goals, whether ongoing or for the upcoming week; discuss issues that may impact
upcoming efforts, such as upcoming exams for the first- and second-year medical students;
and to summarize the progress done in the meeting so far. As a tool to keep the project
moving forward, this standing meeting ensured that at least a few hours of work were
completed weekly regardless of our other time constraints. This prevented the project from
getting lost in the “back burner” of responsibilities that we have as faculty and that our
students have for their academic performance.

We utilized Google’s collaborative software apps, Gdrive15 and Gsheets16, to manage the
progress of our project. We recommend using open-source, collaborative, and cloud-based
software as the home of your reviews-in-progress. This offers a low-cost alternative to
expensive software packages. The Google collaborative software apps, which are
cloud-based, allowed our group to access the materials anywhere at any time and see real-time

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updates to the process.

For each step in the process of the review, we utilized a different, customized spreadsheet,
details of which can be found in the published review2. These spreadsheets were generated by
the faculty to be easy to use, easy to understand, and provide consistency across the project
members. For example, we used prioritized drop-down boxes for our full-text screening that
listed the criteria from most important reason to least important reason. Each line included the
name of the person working on the item and the outcome of their assessment. We instructed
the students to use the drop-down like a list of yes or no questions such that the first “no” they
encountered would be the selected reason for exclusion. This helped increase the efficiency of
the process by only selecting one exclusion reason even if multiple reasons were present. This
also allowed easy collation of the exclusion reasons when we compiled the tables for the
required appendices that list the reasons studies were removed from the review. As we moved
forward on our review, we trained the group on how to use each spreadsheet.

While we had weekly meetings where we would discuss the methods to be used during the
review process, there was rarely a week that everyone on the team could attend. To address
this, we recorded the training discussions that occurred at the start of each new step. Once
completed, the recording was uploaded into a shared Google Drive folder for everyone to
access. This accomplished several goals, the first being that the absent members had access to
the same visual and oral directions as other team members. Second, it allowed team members
to go back and revisit the instructions as needed. Finally, it generated a record of each step
and how the steps were completed.

The final key project management strategy that we used as part of this project was to loosely
delegate tasks. The team discussed feasible metrics (e.g., number of article assessments) and
deadlines. An example assignment to the students was to complete at least ten article
assessments over the course of two weeks. We, however, did not assign specific articles to
each student. Instead, the students identified the ten assessments they wished to do in those
two weeks. This strategy kept students accountable for the work but did not call out students
when they completed their assigned tasks. Occasionally, some students would be unable to
finish the task by the deadline, but others would step in to help their peers. Providing the
students with some structure and some flexibility increased the confidence, happiness, and
productivity of our students throughout the project. However, flexibility with deadlines did
cause delays in the project timeline.

Revising our protocol

As with any plan, our original published protocol did not survive its encounter with the
systematic review itself. Several of the faculty collaborating on this project had completed the
JBI training together and had discussed the project at length during that initial phase. Later, as
we wrote the protocol with a few students, we further refined our thoughts. However, as more
students were brought on, there became a distance between the ideation in the faculty’s minds
and the students’ understanding of their tasks. Many portions of our protocol required
tweaking with minor adjustments to match the reality of the work. We also encountered larger
hurdles that required more substantial revisions to our protocol.

When we began working on our full-text screening, we quickly discovered that the phrasing

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of our inclusion and exclusion criteria in our protocol did not match the goal of the research
question. We had trained our students to follow the letter of the criteria, not the spirit. Thus,
when a student and a faculty member served as the two reviewers for a specific article, there
was a discrepancy between them on whether the article met the inclusion criteria or not. As
more of these discrepancies appeared, we discovered the difference in interpretation of the
protocol. As this posed a significant, critical point in the applicability of our study, we needed
to revisit the protocol and clarify our methods. The faculty members on the team discussed
the specifics and then discussed it with the students in the next meeting. The number of
discrepancies decreased after such meetings. Changes made in the protocol were listed in the
review as deviations from said protocol.

This experience taught us the importance of precision in our language and our directions to
the students, as well as the importance of flexibility in our thinking. Shifting the criterion to
better match our goal allowed many more studies to be included that would otherwise be
excluded if we followed the letter of our protocol. This is important because we were able to
garner additional information regarding our research question, increasing the power and
strength of our study. It also demonstrated to the students that having this flexibility and
documenting it is part of the research process.

Discussion
This project was the team’s first major systematic review, and the librarian requested to be
part of the entire process to gain a better footing and grounding in all steps involved in an ES
project. The team recognizes that it was a unique situation (being the first review and the
pandemic), and it is unlikely that the members would do the same for following ES projects.
Librarians do not commonly participate this heavily in a review since they are ES methods
experts and rarely have a background in the subject matter. This project enriched our
understanding of librarian-medical student collaboration and highlighted the challenges in
both the literature and multi-disciplinary collaborations.

Benefits of librarian-medical student collaboration

Taking the lead with the students on the protocol allowed the librarian to offer in-depth
mentoring and training of the JBI methodology. It allowed for different teaching and training
modalities with varying approaches of students, expertise, and skill levels. An unexpected
benefit of having this time with a small group of students was that it allowed the librarian to
have a greater understanding of medical students’ time constraints, the ways students use
databases, think and frame questions, and their mindset with resources and research. It helped
the librarian be a better liaison by getting to know the users of the resources more intimately.
Having less time now for hands-on small group training, our institution has subscribed to
software (Covidence) that assists with this and for the librarian to work with colleagues to
develop tailored materials for different steps of the process to allow for a less hands-on
approach.

The librarian found in this project that working with students helped build their confidence
and reflect on their understanding, which aided not only in the search but the writing of the
protocol, and mentoring and training newly added students to the project. The students on this
project were able to be more open and vulnerable with the librarian, than with other faculty.

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Collaborating does take more time in some respects but ultimately benefited our team since all
involved had a strong understanding of the question and the content being sought.

In contrast to our experience with this project, our librarians rely less on students and subject
matter experts in developing searches. In their current projects, they usually meet with teams
to discuss MeSH definitions and review entry terms as well as look over initial results and
how to refine or revise the search to improve either sensitivity or precision. Other team
members are often familiar with acronyms and synonyms unfamiliar to librarians and can
often expand searches and assist with the effectiveness of the search.

Our institution has now implemented a tiered service model for ES projects with two tiers of
consultant or author. The consultant role would PRESS the search developed by the team and
provide feedback. The librarian in the author role would develop the search strategy and have
another librarian PRESS it.

Working on ES projects with medical and health science students allows for in-depth
collaboration and understanding of each other’s roles and expertise. It benefits both the
librarian and the student. The librarian can offer encouragement, help connect with faculty,
listen and support by bringing questions to the group. Participating in ES projects boosts
confidence in interacting professionally and strengthens subject knowledge and skills in
writing and working collaboratively. For our team, it allowed for equalizing roles and faculty
dictating tasks, but also identifying ways for students to participate and motivated them to
seek out ways to contribute, taking into account their capacity and time limits.

Challenges encountered in the literature

One approach we used in this project was to modify a validated search. Some experts note
that by modifying a validated search, it is no longer valid. However, search building for an ES
project is an iterative and involved process. Modifying a validated search increased the
efficiency of drafting and formalizing the searches for this project. Using a validated search as
a starting point can be a valuable step in the search strategy development process. Every ES
project’s search improves as we learn more about the methods and our skills increase.

Another challenge in our systematic review of diagnostic accuracy was the lack of diagnostic
data in many of the published studies. We expected all diagnostic accuracy studies to adhere
to the STARD (Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuray studies) guidelines17

published in 2015 and set international standards for publishing and reporting on diagnostic
accuracy studies. Many of the studies did not meet these standards, affecting the data
extraction stage of the project. The data analyst on the project, being the second data
extractor, noticed that while the medical and demographic data were extracted with accuracy,
the numbers related to sensitivity and specificity were more difficult. The lack of adherence to
STARD guidelines17 made it hard to extract the underlying values for sensitivity and
specificity. It required additional training for the students on how to obtain those values from
the text of the paper as opposed to a table.

Challenges faced during collaboration

As anyone who has worked with pre-clinical medical students can attest, they are quite busy

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and have difficulty focusing on extracurricular activities such as research. To combat this, we
utilized a large team of students so that the work was distributed across multiple students,
reducing the amount of work any individual student needed to complete. Our review took
several years to complete (ideation in June 2020 to manuscript submission in July 2023),
which meant that some of our students who joined the project early in the pandemic were
graduating and moving on to their residencies before the review was completed. Due to the
length of the project, the search was run in 2021 as well as in 2022. Additionally, we brought
in new students who needed to be trained and mentored as the project continued.

Mentoring and training students is not an easy task, especially when you throw in the varying
levels of experience the students bring into the project. It sometimes required individual
meetings as well as additional videos for the students to be able to complete the project and
their research experience successfully.

There is potential for these types of projects to put an undue burden on librarians to mentor
and train students in the ES methodology. Again, the authors emphasize the need to define
roles and responsibilities at the start of the project and have a clearly defined ES service
model. There are students and faculty who are used to seeing librarians in a service role rather
than as co-researchers and a full team member since their expertise and skill set are different
from other faculty. The data scientist and librarian share this specialized research role on the
team and sometimes need to discuss the intellectual contribution with other faculty and
students, reminding them that it warrants rights and privileges on the project, such as
authorship.

Takeaways
This project has reinforced the importance of fostering successful partnerships. To
accomplish this, we have the following recommendations.

1. Clear roles and responsibilities

In our project, we defined roles and responsibilities based on tasks to be completed. The
librarians brought expertise in information science, search design, protocol development, and
ES methodology. Trainees bought their clinical insights and were responsible for screening
and data collection. The faculty held leadership and mentoring responsibilities along with
subject matter expertise. The data scientist led the statistical methods of the ES project.
Expectations for authorship were defined and expressed to individuals who joined the project.

Moving forward, students would have a role in developing the research question. One
potential method that could be used is to have the students write 2-3 research questions on a
topic based on the acronym frameworks (PICO, PIRD, etc.). Then each student would look
through various databases to determine what work was done on their topics and refine their
questions. Finally, the team would collaboratively select a research question to pursue as a
systematic review. Having an interdisciplinary team for ES projects, including a librarian, a
subject matter expert, and a data scientist, is highly recommended. Each team member will
bring a fresh outlook to the review question, inclusion-exclusion criteria as well as
conclusions about the meta-analysis. The students on the team will also obtain experience
with multiple disciplines, thus enhancing their research experience. Each discipline has

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overlapping and unique roles within an ES project, which need to be clearly defined.

For many ES projects, it would be desirable to have someone fulfill the role of the data
analyst. The person fulfilling the data analyst role would ideally have working knowledge of
statistical models used within the subject matter. For example, in our project, decisions
needed to be made about how to address the heterogeneity of the data and the effect of
outliers which was outside the expertise of the other team members. Again, clarity of
expectations from the individual fulfilling this role needs to be established early on.

2. Ongoing communication and mutual respect

For any project with an interdisciplinary team, it is important to have healthy and ongoing
communication between the team members to successfully complete the project. For our
team, the weekly meetings provided a forum to discuss the project. Also, follow-up emails
were used to summarize the meeting and ensure communication with the team members who
missed the meeting. The team was actively encouraged to communicate in a way that suited
them through inclusive language and various communication platforms. Decisions need to be
made at each stage of the review and cannot be made arbitrarily by one person otherwise, that
could lead to bias. Disagreements that occurred during screening involved discussions with
different team members (trainees and faculty), where each team member was invited to share
their opinion. Errors were acknowledged and addressed irrespective of who made them.

The selection of the team is critical to project success. The personalities of individuals and the
team can radically impact the project’s success. Expertise can be gained, but attitudes are
harder to shift. It is vital to recognize each person’s contribution to the project and respect the
other’s expertise and experience. The culture of mutual respect was established in the first
meeting based on the faculty’s interactions with each other and the students. The team also
acknowledged and celebrated each member’s worth as an individual, including achievements
outside the project.

Conclusions
Our team encourages librarians who are interested in collaborative teams to be clear about
their role and the team’s expectations. It can be helpful to have a service model outlined so
that it can be referenced. Overall, we had a good experience in completing our systematic
review on the diagnostic accuracy of rapid antigen tests for COVID-19. Our success lies in
our flexibility, clear communication, project management strategies, collaborative working
spaces (live sessions and asynchronous), and commitment to high-quality, rigorous analysis
and work (See Figure 1).

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Figure 1. Pillars of successful evidence synthesis projects. Selection of a good team, regular
communication, clear expectations of each team member, particularly the role of the librarian
as a co-investigator, timelines and milestones, and collaborative software.

CRediT
Megan Armond: Conceptualization, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing

Sherli Koshy-Chenthittayil: Conceptualization, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review &
Editing

Amy EL Stone: Conceptualization, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing

References
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drive.google.com
sheets.google.com

