Background: Residency and fellowship programs at Cooper University Hospital (CUH) increasingly request librarian support to teach the systematic review process. Specifically, the surgery department requested workshops with the goal of forming teams to publish studies. Cooper Medical School of Rowan University (CMSRU) librarians developed four workshops on conducting systematic reviews from beginning to end. Due to a lack of institutional subscriptions, workshops highlighted free and open source tools. Subsequently, librarians joined SR teams where they trained collaborators on free and open source products. We continually adapt the workshops for other departments and dispel the myth that systematic reviews require expensive software.

Description: "Conducting Systematic Review Studies" workshops were created by librarians for CUH residents, fellows, medical students, and faculty, designed for those with minimal prior knowledge. Free software for deduplication, screening, project management, and research data management were highlighted. During training, participants signed up for accounts with many of the programs to learn their utility. For example, a test rayyan collection was used in an activity to practice screening articles.

Implementation: Following the surgery workshops, teams formed of faculty, librarians, residents, biostatisticians and medical students. They put the content directly into practice. Example tools used included Rayyan, Open Science Framework, Zotero, and SRDR+. Evaluation: Outcomes that will be evaluated at this project’s completion will be the publishing of the protocols and research studies, establishing an official systematic review service, and surveying institutional systematic review authors of their experiences using open source tools.

Conclusion:After completion and eventual publication of the resulting systematic reviews, the librarians plan to survey our collaborators. The intended outcome is the widespread use of free and open source tools. Qualitative interviews will assess experiences using the software taught. Continual evaluation of the open source software provides added value to researchers. The librarians involved in the teams are gathering data on how much staff time is required to be an effective collaborator, including training. This information will help set up additional parameters for future collaboration between librarians and research teams as part of a new systematic review service.