The first Journal Club of 2020 met on 8 January to talk about : Dalton, M., 2019. How individual consultations with a librarian can support systematic reviews in the social sciences. Journal of Information Literacy, 13(2), pp.163–172.
Our first discussion question was whether this article sufficiently defines what a systematic review is, and whether this is understood by student researchers in the social sciences. A key question we ask students in our courses is if they should be doing a systematic review at all. Systematic reviews entail very precise methodologies which can result in a large and time consuming piece of work. We find that in the social sciences, what many students want is to review the literature systematically, which is not the same.