Systematic Review Automation Tools for End-to-End Query Formulation

Abstract

Systematic reviews are used widely in the biomedical and healthcare domains. Systematic reviews aim to provide a complete and exhaustive overview of the medical literature for a specific research question. Core to the construction of a systematic review is the search strategy. The main component of a search strategy is a complex Boolean query, typically developed by information specialists (e.g., librarians). The aim of the search strategy is to retrieve relevant studies that will contribute to the outcomes of the systematic review. One barrier information specialists face when developing a search strategy is the enormous amount of medical literature that exists in databases. This vast amount of literature means that search strategies often suffer from biases (e.g., lack of expertise, overconfidence, limited knowledge of the domain) and are incomplete, or retrieve far too many studies (possibly as a result of the biases, but also due to the tools used to develop search strategies). Retrieving too many studies impacts the time and financial costs of the review, and retrieving too few studies may impact the outcomes of the review. Therefore, it is vital to support expert searchers develop effective search strategies. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end set of advanced tools for information specialists. These tools are tightly integrated into an existing Open Source search strategy refining package (searchrefiner). These tools aim to address the problems associated with search strategy development by providing a complete framework from query development, to refinement, to documentation. The implementation of these tools also offers a glimpse at the ease at which related tools may be implemented within the searchrefiner ecosystem. More information about the tools including installation, documentation, and screenshots is made available on the searchrefiner website: https://ielab.io/searchrefiner.