Knowledge Syntheses Search Strategy Repositories: Canadian Case Studies

Knowledge synthesis research is central to evidence-based medicine. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses literature search extension (PRISMA-S) outlines full reporting of the search strategy component including uploading documentation of all search strategies into a data repository to increase accessibility, transparency, and reproducibility. In response to the PRISMA-S recommendations, Canadian universities and health care institutions have been increasingly offering local services for librarians to support depositing and sharing search strategies in a digital data repository on the Borealis platform. Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, is a bilingual, multidisciplinary, secure, Canadian research data repository which supports open discovery, management, sharing, and preservation of Canadian research data. We argue that knowledge synthesis searches are data, and therefore, deserve a place in data repositories. Three case studies of knowledge synthesis repositories from three institutions will be presented: McGill University, Université de Montréal teaching hospitals, and the Health Sciences Information Consortium (HSIC) which includes the University of Toronto and affiliated hospitals. This talk will discuss the reasons for choosing a data repository, decisions made, challenges encountered, and lessons learned

Lesson study in vocational education and training : the status quo in four European countries

This paper introduces the ERASMUS+ project LS4VET, which aims to develop a Lesson Study model for the VET sector with the goal to encourage innovation and change in vocational education by creating an open-online course to support collaborative professionalism for VET educators. The status quo of Lesson Study in the four partner countries Austria, Hungary, Malta, and the Netherlands is described and an outlook on the development of a Lesson Study model for VET is given.peer-reviewe

Quantifying blood loss in medical abortion: a scoping review protocol

The objective of this scoping review is to better understand the extent of blood lost in individuals who have a medical abortion or termination of pregnancy. This information can assist clinicians when counselling around expectations with medical abortion and develop further research around medical abortion outcomes

Shut Up and Write: How to write effectively

This is a presentation on implementing an academic writing group at a University of Toronto library, presented at the May 2019 TRY Conference.Why are students finding it so hard to write productively? How can students break free from distractions—digital distractions in particular—as well as the challenges of writing in isolation? And what can libraries do to alleviate this growing issue of struggling to be productive especially since writing is a central part of academic life? This presentation will offer insight into the weekly “Shut Up and Write” sessions that Gerstein Science Information Centre began offering in January 2019. The original Shut Up and Write movement began in 2007 in the San Francisco Bay Area but has quickly spread across the globe. The initiative had a major online presence on social media, connecting writers as they dedicated a couple hours of their time to focus on whatever writing they needed to get done. It used the Pomodoro technique, an effective way of structuring writing time by having writing “sprints” followed by short, scheduled breaks—making it easier for writers to sit down, write, and recuperate. Though the official virtual Shut Up and Write sessions have retired, the movement still lives on, and can be incorporated into your own library. This presentation will cover what academic writing groups are and how they differ from simply spending the day in the library, the benefits of writing in a communal environment, either virtually or in person, and how an academic writing group as such can be integrated into your library to better assist students with the discipline, structure, and set of practices which can improve focus on their academic work. We will walk you through the steps we took in designing and implementing this program for students of all disciplines into Gerstein library and what the students are saying about it

Knowledge Synthesis Protocol Template

The Library Services team at Unity Health Toronto has created a protocol template that can be used for all types of knowledge synthesis projects