ArticleHealth information science and systems2014
Design and implementation of Metta, a metasearch engine for biomedical literature retrieval intended for systematic reviewers.
Article in Health information science and systems, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled 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.
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.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Safer tattooing interventions in prisons: a systematic review and call to action.BMC public health · 2018Pooled it
- Systematic review of health and behavioural outcomes of smoking cessation interventions in prisons.Tobacco control · 2016Pooled it
- Diagnostic accuracy of point-of-care tests for hepatitis C virus infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis.PloS one · 2015Pooled it
- The Automated Systematic Search Deduplicator (ASySD): a rapid, open-source, interoperable tool to remove duplicate citations in biomedical systematic reviews.BMC biology · 2023Article
- Still moving toward automation of the systematic review process: a summary of discussions at the third meeting of the International Collaboration for Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR).Systematic reviews · 2019Article
- A probabilistic automated tagger to identify human-related publications.Database : the journal of biological databases and curation · 2018Article
- Article
- Wasted research when systematic reviews fail to provide a complete and up-to-date evidence synthesis: the example of lung cancer.BMC medicine · 2016Article
- Automated confidence ranked classification of randomized controlled trial articles: an aid to evidence-based medicine.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2015Article
- Aggregator: a machine learning approach to identifying MEDLINE articles that derive from the same underlying clinical trial.Methods (San Diego, Calif.) · 2015Article
- Biocuration with insufficient resources and fixed timelines.Database : the journal of biological databases and curation · 2015Article
- Accuracy of Rapid Point-of-Care Diagnostic Tests for Hepatitis B Surface Antigen-A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.Journal of clinical and experimental hepatology · 2014Review
- Systematic review automation technologies.Systematic reviews · 2014Article
- Rule-based deduplication of article records from bibliographic databases.Database : the journal of biological databases and curation · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundIndividuals and groups who write systematic reviews and meta-analyses in evidence-based medicine regularly carry out literature searches across multiple search engines linked to different bibliographic databases, and thus have an urgent need for a suitable metasearch engine to save time spent on repeated searches and to remove duplicate publications from initial consideration. Unlike general users who generally carry out searches to find a few highly relevant (or highly recent) articles, systematic reviewers seek to obtain a comprehensive set of articles on a given topic, satisfying specific criteria. This creates special requirements and challenges for metasearch engine design and implementation.
methodsWe created a federated search tool that is connected to five databases: PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. Retrieved bibliographic records were shown online; optionally, results could be de-duplicated and exported in both BibTex and XML format.
resultsThe query interface was extensively modified in response to feedback from users within our team. Besides a general search track and one focused on human-related articles, we also added search tracks optimized to identify case reports and systematic reviews. Although users could modify preset search options, they were rarely if ever altered in practice. Up to several thousand retrieved records could be exported within a few minutes. De-duplication of records returned from multiple databases was carried out in a prioritized fashion that favored retaining citations returned from PubMed.
conclusionsSystematic reviewers are used to formulating complex queries using strategies and search tags that are specific for individual databases. Metta offers a different approach that may save substantial time but which requires modification of current search strategies and better indexing of randomized controlled trial articles. We envision Metta as one piece of a multi-tool pipeline that will assist systematic reviewers in retrieving, filtering and assessing publications. As such, Metta may find wide utility for anyone who is carrying out a comprehensive search of the biomedical literature.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.