Abstrackr: Streamline Your Systematic Reviews

Abstrackr: Streamline Your Systematic Reviews

Conducting systematic reviews can be a daunting task, especially when faced with thousands of citations. Abstrackr, developed by Brown University's Center for Evidence Synthesis in Health, offers a free, open-source solution to simplify this process. Designed to semi-automate the citation screening phase, Abstrackr leverages machine learning to predict the relevance of studies based on titles and abstracts, significantly reducing the manual workload. Key Features of Abstrackr AI-Powered Recommendations: Utilize machine learning algorithms to identify and prioritize relevant citations, allowing researchers to focus on the most pertinent studies. Collaborative Screening: Invite team members to participate in the screening process, facilitating efficient…
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How to Peer Review Search Strategies

How to Peer Review Search Strategies

I recently did a short course on "How to Peer Review Search Strategies". This was offered by INSTATS - an organization that offers several excellent research related courses. What is Peer reviewing of search strategies? In India, we have a lacuna of knowledge about search strategies and the need for them to be structured. Most often very little thought is given to the strategy and it is done in an ad-hoc manner. Peer reviewing is something no one even thinks about.. The six hour session over two evenings - run by two expert Information Professionals - Carol Lefebvre - and…
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Access alone is not enough. Train everybody

Access alone is not enough. Train everybody

Dr GN is a faculty in a medical college. He is registered for QMedCourses and approached me with a request for help. He is studying for an additional degree in an institution in the UK and has to write a systematic review as part of the program. He said that the requirement was that he had to do it all by himself and could not get a team to work with him. While this is unusual as systematic reviews are ideally done by a team (to reduce bias), in this case the objective of solo working is to learn every…
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