Using R markdown for replicable experiments in evidence based medicine

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a methodology based on the R Markdown framework for replicating an experiment of query rewriting in the context of medical eHealth. We present a study on how to re-propose the same task of systematic medical reviews with the same conditions and methodologies to a larger group of participants. The task is the CLEF eHealth Task Technologically Assisted Reviews in Empirical Medicine which consists in finding all the most relevant medical documents, given an information need, with the least effort. We study how lay people, students of a master degree in languages in this case, can help the retrieval system in finding more relevant documents by means of a query rewriting approach.