Knowledge Synthesis in Engineering: A Practical Guide to Contextualizing Different Review Methodologies

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

There is a rapidly increasing amount of scientific information being produced daily, and researchers have acknowledged the significant issues with being able to stay on top of new and emerging research. Literature reviews serve several purposes to combat this: 1) to synthesize research, 2) to critically evaluate it and 3) to provide recommendations. Evidence based systematic searching was initially developed in the medical field, grounded in the knowledge that while there was an importance to having an expert opinion, the best medical advice was based on the accumulation of results from multiple experiments. Engineering has long been borrowing from the review methodology, but this has been happening on a one-off basis, with little to no formal structure to the adaptations. Working with a cross disciplinary team of engineering and health librarians, at institutions across Canada, this paper seeks to contextualize knowledge synthesis for non-health librarians, provide fundamental information on engineering and health databases for reproducible searching, their capabilities and limitations, and open a conversation around working toward a rigorous new methodology applicable in cross disciplinary engineering contexts.