Evidence map›Paper›PMID 25588387›Full record

SynthesisSystematic reviews2015

Better duplicate detection for systematic reviewers: evaluation of Systematic Review Assistant-Deduplication Module.

John Rathbone, Matt Carter, Tammy Hoffmann, Paul Glasziou

Abstract readSystematic Review
In one paragraph

Synthesis in Systematic reviews, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 79 papers, 19 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
79citing papers in PubMed, 19 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

79 citing papers in PubMed, 19 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.

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  3. A Systematic Review on Intervention Treatment in Pathological Gambling.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024
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  12. Cannabinoids for the treatment of dementia.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2021
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  20. Article

19 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

John RathboneCentre for Research in Evidence Based Practice, Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia. jrathbon@bond.edu.au.
Matt Carter
Tammy Hoffmann
Paul Glasziou

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundA major problem arising from searching across bibliographic databases is the retrieval of duplicate citations. Removing such duplicates is an essential task to ensure systematic reviewers do not waste time screening the same citation multiple times. Although reference management software use algorithms to remove duplicate records, this is only partially successful and necessitates removing the remaining duplicates manually. This time-consuming task leads to wasted resources. We sought to evaluate the effectiveness of a newly developed deduplication program against EndNote.

methodsA literature search of 1,988 citations was manually inspected and duplicate citations identified and coded to create a benchmark dataset. The Systematic Review Assistant-Deduplication Module (SRA-DM) was iteratively developed and tested using the benchmark dataset and compared with EndNote's default one step auto-deduplication process matching on ('author', 'year', 'title'). The accuracy of deduplication was reported by calculating the sensitivity and specificity. Further validation tests, with three additional benchmarked literature searches comprising a total of 4,563 citations were performed to determine the reliability of the SRA-DM algorithm.

resultsThe sensitivity (84%) and specificity (100%) of the SRA-DM was superior to EndNote (sensitivity 51%, specificity 99.83%). Validation testing on three additional biomedical literature searches demonstrated that SRA-DM consistently achieved higher sensitivity than EndNote (90% vs 63%), (84% vs 73%) and (84% vs 64%). Furthermore, the specificity of SRA-DM was 100%, whereas the specificity of EndNote was imperfect (average 99.75%) with some unique records wrongly assigned as duplicates. Overall, there was a 42.86% increase in the number of duplicates records detected with SRA-DM compared with EndNote auto-deduplication.

conclusionsThe Systematic Review Assistant-Deduplication Module offers users a reliable program to remove duplicate records with greater sensitivity and specificity than EndNote. This application will save researchers and information specialists time and avoid research waste. The deduplication program is freely available online.

Indexed as

Databases, BibliographicPublicationsAlgorithmsHumansInformation Storage and RetrievalRecordsReproducibility of ResultsSensitivity and Specificity

Identifiers

PMID25588387
PMCPMC4320616

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.