Table 1 Software tools showcased at the first meeting
Software or tool | Website or publication link | Task automated | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
Covidence | Screen citations | Initially designed for citation screening, it is now developing features like full-text reviewing, risk of bias assessment, extraction of study data and links directly with RevMan. | |
RevMan HAL | Write up review | The writing of Cochrane reviews involves accurate copying of data from one part of a RevMan file to another. RevMan HAL has been designed to produce an automatic first draft of important sections of a Cochrane review. It uses already entered data from date of last search, analysis and summary of findings tables. to generate text for most sections of the abstract, summary of search, effects of interventions and summary of main results in the discussion section. | |
eSuRFr | Snowball citations | The proposed method for automatic citation snowballing is accurate and is capable of obtaining the full texts or abstracts for a substantial proportion of the scholarly citations in review articles. By automating the process of citation snowballing, it may be possible to reduce the time and effort of common evidence surveillance. tasks such as keeping trial registries up to date and conducting systematic reviews. | |
Rayyan | Screen citations | The process begins with the author including or excluding a training set of studies. Then, an algorithm using computer learning starts to provide a ranking system for the remaining papers based upon the papers that have been selected. | |
EPPI-Reviewer | Screen citations | EPPI-Reviewer acts as a reference manager, imports references in a wide variety of ‘tagged’ formats, conducts duplicate checking using ‘fuzzy logic’, stores documents, has direct searching of PubMed and has study classification and data extraction schemas with a multi-user interface to allow. comparison of results between researchers. It also contains ways of calculating common measures of effect (odds ratios, risk ratios, risk differences, standardised mean differences, mean differences) and can perform meta-analyses. | |
Evidence Pipeline | http://community.cochrane.org/tools/data-management-tools/evidence-pipeline | Screen full text | The Evidence Pipeline will address the difficulty in finding reports of studies for inclusion in a Cochrane review. The project will build an ‘Evidence Pipeline’ in which study citations identified through automated and enhanced centralised search activities, including Project Transform’s Getting. Involved platform, are ‘triaged’ to the most relevant review group or review using machine learning technologies. |
Systematic Review Accelerator (SRA) | Devise search strategy Search De-duplicate | A multi-function tool that currently enables researchers to analyse articles for building search strategies and translating search syntax between databases to speed up the search process. Also contains a de-duplicator to remove the need to manually de-duplicate the same studies from multiple databases. | |
Systematic Review Toolbox | N/A | A comprehensive database of tools for automating and conducting systematic reviews is maintained by Dr. Chris Marshall, University of York. |