Synthetic Knowledge Synthesis in Hospital Libraries

Abstract

Knowledge explosion is associated with the exponential growth of research literature production, triggering the need for new approaches to structure and synthesize knowledge. Traditional knowledge synthesis approaches have weaknesses like requiring many resources, being time and labor consuming, and being executed manually. To overcome these weaknesses, we developed a new semi-automated synthesis approach, synthetic knowledge synthesis (SKS). The new approach is a triangulation of bibliometrics, bibliometric mapping, and content analysis and can be used by hospital librarians to advance their role as partners in health research. In this paper, we present SKS and demonstrate its use.