Large-scale systematic review support for guideline development in diabetes precision medicine

Involving librarians as team members can lead to better quality in reviews. To improve their search results, an international diabetes project involved two medical librarians in a large-scale project planning of a series of systematic reviews for clinical guidelines in diabetes precision medicine.

The precision diabetes project was divided into teams. Four diabetes mellitus types (type 1, type 2, gestational, and monogenic) were divided into teams focusing on diagnostics, prevention, treatment, or prognostics. A search consultation plan was set up for the project to help organize the work. We performed searches in Embase and PubMed for 14 teams, building complex searches that involved non-traditional search strategies. Our search strategies generated very large amounts of records that created challenges in balancing sensitivity with precision. We also performed overlap searches for type 1 and type 2 diabetes search strategies; and assisted in setting up reviews in the Covidence tool for screening.

This project gave us opportunities to test methods we had not used before, such as overlap comparisons between whole search strategies. It also gave us insights into the complexity of performing a search balancing sensitivity and specificity and highlights the need for a clearly defined communication plan for extensive evidence synthesis projects.