Hedging Your Bets: An Introductory Webinar on Locating and Using Search Hedges

If you are new to searching or have searching experience and want to begin to learn one of the skills that all expert searchers and librarians on systematic review teams have, you’ll want to learn what search hedges can do for you.

Emily Brennan and Lynn Kysh, two highly experienced searchers and co-authors on systematic reviews, will introduce you to the world of search hedges–a combination of subject headings and keywords on a topic that are added to a search strategy to optimize retrieval.

Through a presentation, interactive polls, group discussion, and individual work, you’ll learn what a hedge is and how a sensitive hedge is created and validated to ensure it works properly. You’ll see how using a hedge can save you time and improve the quality of your searches, and you’ll discover where you can find existing hedges and the means to evaluate them.

You’ll leave the session with knowledge you can use in your next search and a list of hedge repositories and evaluation checklist you can use to identify hedges you can freely use.

This course is required for Level II of the Systematic Review Services Specialization.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of thiswebinar, participants will be able to:

• Define a search hedge and explain the value of sensitive search hedges in systematic reviews and other evidence syntheses
• Access, evaluate, and use existing search hedges available in repositories

Audience

Health sciences Librarians and health information professionals with beginner to intermediate health sciences searching skills.

Presenters

Emily Brennan, MLIS, is a Research and Education Informationist at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Libraries. She is the liaison to the College of Medicine and MUSC Hospital staff, where she teaches evidence-based practice, works on systematic review teams, and contributes to the development of hospital guidelines. She has co-authored over a dozen systematic reviews.

Lynn Kysh, MLIS, MPP is a research librarian at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) in which capacity she provides support for global health and informatics initiatives. She has over a decade of experience in health sciences librarianship and has co-authored a number of systematic reviews and scoping reviews and protocols.

MLA CE: 1.5