A paper written by a team of medical librarians from the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library was recently published in Research Integrity and Peer Review. The paper investigates librarian involvement in the peer review process of systematic review manuscripts. Health science librarians often contribute to the production of systematic reviews, but little was known about their involvement in peer reviewing SR manuscripts submitted to journals for publiction. As experts in conducting literature searches and systematic review methodologies, the team suggests that librarians have should play a larger role in the peer review process.
To better assess the landscape, the authors distrubuted a survey to three listservs used by biomedical information professionals who do systematic reviews. The study found that the majority of librarians surveyed (78%) have not been invited to peer review systematic review manuscripts, yet many are willing to provide this service. Editors should involve experienced librarians with peer review, and the paper suggests some strategies to consider.