Harboring an ocean of synthesized knowledge: Health sciences librarians’ perspectives on depositing knowledge synthesis search strategies in research data repositories

Health sciences librarians in Canada have been increasingly depositing and sharing knowledge synthesis (KS) search strategies and database exports via research data repositories. By defining search strategies as the code that extract the data of database exports, we can expand the mandate of research data management (RDM) infrastructure to include this work (Rod and Boruff, 2024). To better support these initiatives, it is important to understand the perspectives of librarians on their comfort or experience in using research data repositories to deposit KS work for long-term preservation and re-use. This presentation reports the results of a survey of Canadian health sciences librarians’ perspectives on the RDM aspects of KS search strategies and the potential barriers they may face. We invited 498 individuals to participate if they were listed as a health sciences librarian or specialist on public websites of academic, hospital, government, or special libraries in Canada. We received 128 submitted responses for a 25.7% response rate. A large majority of participants (84.8%, n = 125) agreed or strongly agreed that “search strategies and their related output files are the equivalent of research data and code for a [KS] publication”. A majority also agreed or strongly agreed (59%, n = 127) that KS projects should have data management plans (DMPs) and that depositing search strategies facilitates open science (93.8%, n = 128). More than half of the participants also reported being somewhat or very concerned about their knowledge level of RDM (56.7%, n = 127) and repository platforms (51.9%, n = 127). Encouragingly, more than half of the participants indicated interest in increasing their skills in a variety of RDM-related topics (e.g., DMPs, data deposit, etc.). We will discuss how the survey results could inform collaborations to develop best practices for health sciences librarians integrating RDM activities into KS research.