Fenner School of Environment & Society, The Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia.
Res Synth Methods. 2019 Dec;10(4):606-614. doi: 10.1002/jrsm.1374. Epub 2019 Oct 18.
The field of evidence synthesis is growing rapidly, with a corresponding increase in the number of software tools and workflows to support the construction of systematic reviews, systematic maps, and meta-analyses. Despite much progress, however, a number of problems remain, including slow integration of new statistical or methodological approaches into user-friendly software, low prevalence of open-source software, and poor integration among distinct software tools. These issues hinder the utility and transparency of new methods to the research community. Here, I present revtools, an R package to support article screening during evidence synthesis projects. It provides tools for the import and deduplication of bibliographic data, screening of articles by title or abstract, and visualization of article content using topic models. The software is entirely open-source and combines command-line scripting for experienced programmers with custom-built user interfaces for casual users, with further methods to support article screening to be added over time. revtools provides free access to novel methods in an open-source environment and represents a valuable step in expanding the capacity of R to support evidence synthesis projects.
证据综合领域发展迅速，支持系统评价、系统图谱和荟萃分析构建的软件工具和工作流程数量也相应增加。然而，尽管取得了许多进展，但仍存在一些问题，包括新的统计或方法学方法难以集成到用户友好的软件中、开源软件的普及度低以及不同软件工具之间的集成度差。这些问题阻碍了新方法在研究界的实用性和透明度。在这里，我介绍了 revtools，这是一个支持证据综合项目文章筛选的 R 包。它提供了用于导入和去重书目数据、按标题或摘要筛选文章以及使用主题模型可视化文章内容的工具。该软件完全开源，为有经验的程序员提供了命令行脚本，为普通用户提供了自定义用户界面，随着时间的推移，还将添加更多支持文章筛选的方法。revtools 在开源环境中提供了对新方法的免费访问，这是扩展 R 支持证据综合项目能力的重要一步。
