One of the most important steps in the process of conducting a systematic review or map is data extraction and the production of a database of coding, metadata and study data. There are many ways to structure these data, but to date, no guidelines or standards have been produced for the evidence synthesis community to support their production. On top of this, there is little adoption of easily machine-readable, readily reusable and adaptable databases: these databases would be easier to translate into different formats by review authors, for example for tabulation, visualisation and analysis, and also by readers of the review/map. As a result, it is common for systematic review and map authors to produce bespoke, complex data structures that, although typically provided digitally, require considerable efforts to understand, verify and reuse.
The goal of sysrevdata is to provide examples and extensible toolchains for structuring data for systematic reviews and maps. This package contains a suite of functions to support efficient and reliable translation of databases between formats that are useful for presentation (condensed, human readable tables), filtering and visualisation (wide databases), and analysis (long databases).
