WORKSHOP OVERVIEW:

Reviews (systematic or scoping) are a great way to answer research questions or summarise evidence on a topic, but they take a long time and are a lot of work. Fortunately, there are now tools and methodological innovations that can help with doing reviews. One of these tools available is the Evidence Review Accelerator (TERA) built in Australia by a team at Bond University. TERA improves the speed of conducting reviews by accelerating all the tasks in a review. This workshop will cover all the tools available in TERA, but will focus on using the tools of most value to information specialist/librarians.  Attendees will gain practical experience using TERA quickly design and run precise search strategies, while also gaining background information on the other review tasks to better enable review support at their institution. TERA is available at the following website: https://tera-tools.com/, and a 12-month subscription to TERA is included in the workshop fee.

🗣️ PRESENTER:

The workshop will be presented by Justin Clark, a Research Fellow in Evidence Review Acceleration and lead of the Automation program at the Institute for Evidence-Based Practice (IEBH) at Bond University, Gold Coast Australia. He is also the Cochrane Information Specialist for the Acute Respiratory Infections Group, was a member of the Cochrane Information Specialists Executive and the Co-Lead of the search group of the Living Evidence Network. He is one of the inventors of the Two-Week Systematic Review (2weekSR) method, a founding member of the International Collaboration for the Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR) and leads the development of the Evidence Review Accelerator (TERA), a suite of automation tools that accelerate the production of evidence synthesis.  His research focuses on improving evidence synthesis methods to reduce the resources needed to conduct reviews of the evidence. For more information about Justin’s research please visit his Research Profile: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=55311800800

💸 COST: ALIA – $120; Non-ALIA – $180

🕧 TIME: 10am – 4pm (face to face)

WHAT TO BRING:

BYO laptop; lunch (or head to nearby eatery at lunchtime)

🌏 WHERE: Face to face in either Melbourne, Brisbane or Sydney

Melbourne

Tuesday May 26^th 2026

Royal Australasian College of Surgeons – Skills & Education Space

250/290 Spring St, East Melbourne VIC 3002

Register here: Advances in Systematic Review Automation Methods – Melbourne Workshop

Brisbane

Thursday May 28^th 2026

Pathology Queensland (CSIRO site)

Block 1 (make yourself known at security)

39 Kessels Rd, Coopers Plains QLD 4108

https://maps.app.goo.gl/14zowXMdZuUg6w61A

Register here: Advances in Systematic Review Automation Methods – Brisbane

Sydney

Friday June 12th 2026

Royal North Shore Hospital – Kolling Institute

10 Westbourne Street, St Leonards NSW 2065

Register here: Advances in Systematic Review Automation Methods – Sydney Workshop

The post Advances in Systematic Review Automation (In Person. May Melb 26 & Bris 28, Jun Syd 12) appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

Join us for a practical session on literature searches, focusing on how to present results effectively to clients.

Learn strategies to make your search outputs clear, actionable, and tailored to client needs.

🗣️ Presenters

Jana Waldmann – The King Prince Charles Hospital – Metro North Health

Susie Moreton – Epworth Healthcare (Epworth Knowledge Services)

Jackie Edwards – Murrumbidgee Local Health District
 
Maddie Beer – Monash Health 

Jana is the Manager, Library Services at The Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane, Queensland. You’ll find her most days trawling medical databases for evidence to support patient care, organisational change, and research. With a background in magazine and technical publishing, she is a big fan of templates and making documents functional but pretty. She has a passion for evidence synthesis methods, working with research teams on reviews and raising awareness of best practice through education and training.

Susie trained as a teacher before completing her Masters in Information Science. She has worked in academic libraries and publishing, and joined Epworth in 2009 where her passion for autodidactism, discovery and access has enabled her to contribute across all domains.  EKS is a fully accessible web-based knowledge service which is integrated with Epworth’s clinical, education, research and quality activities.  Susie has positioned literature searching as EKS’s premier service for doctors and senior staff, leveraging our expertise in discovery, access and understanding of our requestors’ needs.  

Jackie is Library Manager at Murrumbidgee Local Health District, located at Wagga Base Hospital. I support MLHD staff and affiliated students from UNSW Rural Medical School and CSU School of Rural Medicine. I have extensive experience in local government, health, and University libraries. My interests include user experience, digital resources, and research.

Madeleine is a Medical Librarian at Monash Health Library with extensive experience in advanced literature searching to support clinical care, research, and organizational decision-making. She also delivers training webinars to enhance literature searching skills among healthcare professionals.

✅ ALIA HLA Competencies

C3: Resources
C5: Digital, ehealth & technology

View HLA Competencies

🕐 When

Thursday, 5 March 2026

 1-2 pm (Vic/NSW/TAS/ACT) | 12-1 pm (QLD) | 12:30-1:30pm (SA) | 11:30am-12:30pm (NT) | 10-11 am (WA) | 3-4 pm (NZ)

🗺️ Where

Online webinar Zoom – a link will be sent the day prior.

This event will be recorded and sent to attendees following the event.

💰 Cost

ALIA Members – Free (One of 14 reasons to consider HLA Membership)
Non-Members – $30

📝 Register

Register / Additional Information

🧗‍♀️ Professional Development

One CPD hour towards Health Professional Development Scheme

The post ALIA HLA: Making It Matter – Deliver Search Results That Hit the Mark (1-2 Thu 5 Mar) appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

👉 These are not run by ALIA or HLA

1️⃣ Open Science & Evidence Synthesis Thursday, October 23, 2025 @ 15:00 UTC/11 am EDT Register here

In this webinar, attendees will learn about the importance of Open Science principles in evidence synthesis and how adopting Open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) workflows are vital for maintaining rigour in evidence synthesis. The session will cover both theory and practical advice, indicating the tradeoffs and cost implications of each component of Open Synthesis. We will discuss examples of good and bad practice, as well as becoming aware of tools to support open practices.

2️⃣ Framing the Research Question & Managing Search Volumes Monday, November 24, 2025 @ 16:00 UTC/11 am EST Register here

We’ll cover the importance of question framing in evidence synthesis as the foundational step in any review project. Attendees will learn about what types of questions can be answered with evidence synthesis and see examples of diverse types of questions. We will cover the theory of question formulation and practical examples of questions formulated for real-world review projects. We’ll discuss the practicalities of the implications of question framing – namely, the volume of evidence we then have to screen for relevance. The session will discuss how to manage this tradeoff of sensitivity (getting everything) versus specificity (staying manageable), and show examples of the time needed for different breadths and types of question.

3️⃣ Adaptive Approaches to Reviewing Evidence & Diverse Workflows Thursday, December 11, 2025 @ 16:00 UTC/11 am EST Register here

What happens if your review isn’t quite standard practice? How can you ensure you finish your review if time runs out? This webinar will focus on real-world application of evidence synthesis methodology best practice and give practical suggestions of ways to ensure you finish your review if resources, time or staff are limited. We will cover the nooks and crannies that lie between standard review types, not the traditional systematic review and meta-analysis but the more unconventional types of review – part-map, part framework. These often more exploratory methods are vital for maintaining rigour and allowing for ongoing work whilst still producing a high-quality, publishable output. We will cover what to do and what to call them. We will also cover practical ways in which you can plan for limitations in your workflows, ensuring you still have a rigorous product even if you run out of time.

About the Speaker

Neal Haddaway is an independent interdisciplinary researcher working in the field of environmental and social policy, but with a particular interest in agri-food supply chains. He has been working as an evidence synthesis methodologist since 2012 and has authored almost 200 publications, including methodology articles, systematic reviews, systematic maps and other forms of syntheses. He has contributed to best practice guidance for systematic reviews and maps. He has worked with the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence as Centre Director and Trustee, the Campbell Collaboration as Co-lead of the Climate Solutions Coordinating Group, and within the Cochrane Climate-Health Working Group. He established the Evidence Synthesis Hackathon and Evidence Synthesis and Meta-Analysis in R Conference, and has personally produced a suite of free online tools, including PRISMA2020 flowcharts and citationchaser. He has been teaching evidence synthesis methodology for 13 years and provides methods courses and training workshops across the world.

The post Three free webinars on evidence synthesis methods by Neal Haddaway (Oct-Dec) appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

Catchii is a web-based software for systematic review screening, developed here in Australia. It supports all stages of the screening process, from duplicate removal to data extraction, and includes features such as multi-user collaboration, advanced keyword highlighting and AI-assisted screening. Most importantly, Catchii is completely free to use, offering a viable alternative to paid tools while remaining comparable in functionality. This session will present Catchii’s features and demonstrate its use in systematic reviews. For more information: https://catchii.org

🗓️ When

Wednesday 23/7/25
1:00pm – 2:00pm AEST 

🌍 Where

Online webinar Zoom – a link will be sent the day prior.

This event will be recorded and sent to attendees following the event.

💲 Cost

ALIA Members – Free. Another reason to consider HLA Membership
Non-Members – $22

📝 Register

Register | Additional Information

The post Catchii: free software for SR screening (1-2, 23 Jul) appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

The post Free Online – Research Support Community (24 – 26 Jun 25) appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

In response to student and staff needs, librarians at Federation University created an Open Education Resource to introduce a complex topic in an easy to understand, step by step way. This lunchtime session will describe the process of creating the resource from inception to publication, and demonstrate the content, features and interactive elements of the resource.

Presenters

• Erin Roga
• Karen Pruis

Erin Roga has a Masters of Information Management from the University of South Australia. Her minor thesis explored the impact of digital skills classes for first year nursing students. In 2022, she attended the Australian Evidence Based Practice Librarians’ Institute. Erin is a liaison librarian for the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at Federation University Australia, and supports students and academics in their teaching, learning and research, with a focus on training for conducting systematic and scoping reviews. She is interested in promoting the need for rigourous methodology and reporting of reviews. In her spare time, she loves to potter in her vegetable patch and hang out with her chicken friends, and is now learning to keep bees and cultivate mushrooms.

Dr. Karen Pruis obtained her PhD from Federation University Australia, and her qualitative thesis explored the lived experience of Chinese international students communicating in English while studying abroad. In 2023, she attended the Australian Evidence Based Practice Librarians’ Institute. Karen is a liaison librarian with the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at Federation University Australia with extensive experience in supporting students and researchers with evidenced-based literature searching. She loves to teach them how to construct a replicable search strategy for scoping and systematic reviews. Finally, Karen has two poodles named CoCo and Margaux who are her best friends and give her a lot of joy.

🕚 When

Tuesday, 27 May 2025

1.00pm – 2.00pm (Vic, NSW, Tas, ACT, QLD),

12:30pm – 1:30pm (SA, NT),

11am – 12:00pm (WA),

3pm – 4pm (NZ)

🌏 Where

Online webinar Zoom – a link will be sent the day prior.

💰 Cost

ALIA Members – FREE (One of 14 benefits of HLA ALIA membership)
Non-Members – $22

📝 Register

Register

The post Introducing scoping & systematic reviews: An Open Education Resource (27 May) appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

The search session will showcase our new and improved version of the Systematic Review Accelerator, so it could be a good opportunity to have a look at our new and improved search tools before we officially launch them later in the year. 

The workshops will outline the tasks involved at each of the key steps of the review process and introduce participants to the freely available SRA tools that can be used to complete these tasks more quickly with tips from experienced systematic reviewers and links to key resources provided.

These workshops are for clinicians, students, researchers, policy makers and information professionals who are currently doing or planning to do a systematic review and would like to learn to do them more efficiently.

To benefit from these workshops, you should:

• be conducting or have conducted a systematic review, or 
• be intending to do a systematic review AND have a good understanding of what systematic reviews are, how they are done, and what constitutes a good quality systematic review. To help you prepare we will provide background material covering these concepts that you can complete before the workshops. 

The series consists of five workshops that cover the key review stages and an additional workshop covering other topics relevant to systematic reviews. Some advanced review concepts may also be covered depending on participants’ requirements. You can attend all the workshops, or just the specific workshops that meet your needs.

Individual Workshops 1 to 5 cost AUD$95 each. We are also offering a FULL package deal which includes Workshops 1 to 5 plus access to Workshop 6 at AUD$400. 

For more information, please see the attached flyer or visit our website: https://bond.edu.au/iebh/workshops/upcoming-workshops 

The post Conducting Accelerated Systematic Reviews – Online via Bond Uni appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

Details / bookings for the six sessions are available here. If you are new to systematic review searching there is one just for you : Systematic Review Conversations: New to Systematic Reviews – My 1st Year

The post Several Systematic Searching Seminars over first half of 2024 …. appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

They are recorded so can be viewed on demand

The full list of Cochrane Live Learning events can be viewed here and if you scroll down then the archive of recorded webinars is available for viewing

The HLA Videos page may also be of interest

The post AI methods in evidence synthesis: free Cochrane Training (1H, 2025) appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

HLA Lunchtime Session

🕐 When: 7 November, 2024 1pm – 2pm AESDT

👫 Presenters: Julie Brown – Covidence; Cassandra Gorton – Monash Health

💲 Cost: Free

🌏 Location: Zoom

https://alia-org-au.zoom.us/j/87053060189?pwd=3zOUVYtCpGjkz09daElV9EaTvY3FJ2.1

Meeting ID: 870 5306 0189 / Passcode: 843323

Covidence is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to streamline the systematic review process. In this webinar Julie Brown, a consultant systematic reviewer from Covidence, will explain how Covidence can support the production of high-quality systematic and other literature reviews through:

●        Workflow management, collaboration and administrator oversight

●        Screening processes including automation and machine learning

●        Customisable data extraction tools

●        User-friendly resources including the Knowledge Base, Academy and downloadable resources such as e-books.

Cassandra Gorton, Manager, Access and Discovery at Monash Health will provide her ‘real-world’ experiences of using Covidence and how Monash Health get the most value from this resource. Cassandra will also demonstrate the Covidence integration with LibKey Nomad.

The post Using Covidence to maximise efficiency for systematic reviews – 🎦 now available appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.

Evidence Synthesis for Librarians and Information Specialists (additional information)

Some related presentations at the fast approaching HLA Conference:

• Reducing research waste and improving access to quality evidence (Prof Paul Glasziou, Bond Uni)
• Developing an evidence-based practice training syllabus to support EBP in a healthcare setting (Keren Moskal, Monash Health)

The post Free online course – Evidence Synthesis for Librarians and Information Specialists appeared first on Health Libraries Australia.