Status: In development

Screening articles for evidence synthesis is typically done using titles and abstracts, however, full text screening can be more efficient because there is no guessing involved when assessing if the methods of a study match inclusion criteria. Full text of articles is also necessary for coding article metadata, such as study location or types of data collected, or for analysing article content, such as with topic modelling. doi2txt facilitates full text article screening, coding, and analysis by retrieving plain text versions of journal articles based on a doi, if available,or bibliographic information such as title and authors when a doi is not available or known. It also contains functions for processing full text articles, such as coding articles from an ontology oftopics, or geocoding articles to get actual or approximate latitude and longitude.

Forestr is an online platform for interactive visualisations of forest plots.

Evidence synthesis (ES) is the process of identifying, collating and synthesising primary scientific research (such as articles and reports) for the purposes of providing reliable, transparent summaries. The goal of this project is to collect, integrate and expand the universe of available functions for ES projects in R, via our proposed metaverse package. Like tidyverse, metaverse is envisioned as a collector package that makes it straightforward to install a set of functions - currently located in separate packages - for a common purpose.

Citations downloaded from bibliographic databases and other resources, such as Google Scholar, are often missing certain details like abstracts or volume/page details that are important for a variety of reasons, such as screening in systematic reviews or locating full text documents. This functionality is intended to be used for filling in missing information from a set of citation files, including abstracts.

Automation tools are speeding up the conduct of evidence synthesis. However, the uptake of these tools amongst reviewers are slow. Potential barriers to use are; 1) the tools often operate in isolation, 2) reviewers need to manipulate their citation data into a specific format to use the tool, and 3) different tools require different levels of programming or computing expertise.