Ann Dyer Earns Certification through Medical Library Association

WSU Health Sciences Library Director Ann Dyer has earned the Systematic Review Services Specialization (SRSS) certificate (Level I) through the Medical Library Association (MLA). SRSS certification provides information retrieval and management skills to support users and researchers in conducting high-quality and reproducible systematic reviews.

Dyer said she pursued the SRSS certificate from MLA to support secondary research in WSU’s health sciences. The library launched a new evidence synthesis service last fall, and Dyer wanted the expertise to manage the service, including best practices for the workflow, the internal peer-review process, communication with researchers, acquiring relevant software, and more.

Health Sciences Library Director Ann Dyer

“As part of our service, each librarian contributes as co-author on evidence synthesis projects such as systematic or scoping reviews,” she said. “Therefore, we each need to have up-to-date technical skills in developing a replicable search methodology. This specialization included many relevant skill-building classes on these search techniques, which helps us improve the quality of secondary research coming out of WSU’s health sciences.”

The MLA, along with a workgroup of experts on systematic reviews and review services, developed the SRSS tailored to librarians’ needs and launched it in 2022. According to a 2024 article in the Journal of the Medical Library Association, “Designing a Framework for Curriculum Building in Systematic Review Competencies for Librarians: A Case Report,” one of the required courses in the specialization was developed by the authors, who set out to build a value-added curriculum that would provide essential searching skills for librarians working in evidence synthesis domains.

The course aligns with six systematic review competencies for librarians developed and published by a group of health science librarians from the University of Michigan in 2017:

  1. Conducting a reference interview
  2. Performing preliminary searches
  3. Selecting appropriate resources to search
  4. Building an extensive, comprehensive, and documented search strategy
  5. Peer-reviewing search strategies, and
  6. Reporting search methods

“As evidence synthesis methodologies continue to evolve, author teams cannot overlook the profound impact of librarians and their search expertise in supporting evidence synthesis methodologies,” the 2024 case report authors concluded. “The development of proficient searching skills and searching instruction techniques among librarians is essential for mitigating bias, ensuring credibility, and upholding the integrity of published evidence syntheses.”