Scoping Review Search Practices in the Social Sciences: Preliminary Results of a Scoping Review

Judith Logan, Assistant Head, User Services, Robarts Library, University of Toronto Libraries
Jenaya Webb, Public Services and Research Librarian, OISE Library, University of Toronto Libraries
Nalini K. Singh, User Services Librarian, Robarts Library, University of Toronto Libraries
Benjamin Walsh, User Services Librarian, Robarts Library, University of Toronto Libraries
Nailisa Tanner; Digital Initiatives Librarian, Memorial University Libraries
Margaret Wall, User Services Librarian and Patron Relations Coordinator, Robarts Library, University of Toronto Libraries
Ana Patricia Ayala, Research Services Librarian, Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto Libraries
 

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Scoping reviews have become an attractive review type in social science disciplines where a breadth of methodological approaches are used to investigate questions about social phenomena. Social science librarians at our institutions have reported a sharp increase in requests for support around this review type in the last half-decade. Our scoping review of scoping reviews explores the growth of this methodology in the social sciences in hopes of informing liaison librarians’ outreach and professional development efforts. Using Web of Science’s categorization of journals in Social Science Citation Index, we seek to understand which disciplines are publishing scoping reviews and how the publication trends have changed over time. Preliminary results indicate that social science disciplines that are health-science adjacent produced the most scoping reviews between 2015 and 2020. Our presentation will detail our progress and outline next steps which includes examining the level of librarian involvement in the selected studies. Our project’s documents—including our protocol—are stored in OSF: https://osf.io/34gq9/ 

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