Building Capacity for Reproducible Evidence Synthesis: Training Opportunities for Librarians

Information specialists (IS) and librarians provide expertise as evidence synthesis collaborators, including database and gray literature searching, and support for information management, documentation and data archiving. A growing body of literature suggests that when IS collaborate with researchers, the quality and reproducibility of evidence syntheses improves. Training opportunities specifically for IS in these methods are scarce, however, particularly outside of the health sciences. This poster will describe two initiatives that fill this critical training gap: Evidence Synthesis Beyond the Health Sciences: A Training for Librarians, and the Library Carpentries Introduction to R and litsearchr lesson. The programs were piloted in August 2020 to over 60 librarians and IS in North America, Europe and Africa. We will elaborate on our approach to hands-on training in an online environment, highlight ways these programs build capacity for reproducible evidence synthesis and teach data science skills to support emerging methods, and discuss plans for future training.