Reviews in RA: What are they and how do I use them?

By Scott Needham
Posted in How to use Research Analysis and FAQ

Reviews in Research Analysis provide users with tools like those developed for screening abstracts in systematic reviews. 

Reviews allow users to import a collection of abstracts from PubMed and then to work through these extracting the key claim from each abstract in the Research Analysis format. The creator of a review will be assigned the leader role and will be able to invite other users to participate in the review. The leader also has other useful tools like being able to set default values for the claims and to be able to compare the claims extracted by each user working on the review.

If you are participating in an existing review then here is what to do:

  1. Go to the "Abstract Screening & Progress" section and press the "Continue Screening!" button.
  2. The review tool will automatically serve up the next abstract in the review list that you haven't yet extracted a claim for.
  3. To complete the claim you need to
    1. Fill the main fields. You can highlight text in the abstract and click the "Subject" button to transfer the highlighted text to the Subject field, this also works for the other main fields. This also highlights all the occurrences in the abstract.
    2. Selecting the closest standard terms helps allot for analysis.
    3. You will need to at least add the tag for Species relevant for the abstract and any other important tags.
    4. Once you are done click the "Add Claim & Next Abstract" button.
    5. Or if there is a problem with the abstract you can exclude it.
  4. In the "View & Edit References" section you can select claims in any order to work on rather than the sequential order required by the "Continue Screening!" page. You can use this to go back to previous claims and update them. You can also unexclude claims if you previously excluded them from the review.
  5. As you progress you will be able to see your progress in the "Abstract Screening & Progress" area.

Here is how to get started with a review as a leader:

  1. Go to the Reviews page from the menu and then click "New Review" button. Give the review a name and description if you wish (it is useful to put the PubMed search details used to get the PubMed ID list in the description). Then press Save.
  2. You will be taken to the review page for the new review. As the creator of the review you will be the leader. The leader has this detailed view of the review and can add abstracts to the review and set the defaults.
  3. In the first section "Review Settings" you can update the name and description for the review. You can also set the default values for claims in the review. This is not required and the users can change the default values when screening, but it may be useful to say set Object to "diabetes" if you are conducting a review of papers that focus on the treatment of diabetes. Remember to press save if you make any changes to this section.
  4. The next section "Add/Remove Reviewers" allows you to add other users to this review. To add a user they must already be signed up to Research Analysis and you will need their email address they signed up with.
  5. The next section "Import & View References" allows you to import references to a review. To do this press the "Import References" button, then select a file that contains a list of PMIDs with one PMID on each line. This is the standard format used by PubMed if you do a search and then choose to download a list of PMIDs. We'll add more formats in future, let us know if you have one in mind. Then press the Import. Once the abstracts and other data for the PubMed IDs have been imported from PubMed the list of articles will show up in the table in this section.
  6. The next section "Abstract Screening & Progress" shows progress on how you are going with the review and if you are the leader of the review it will also show you the progress of the other reviewers. To begin or continue screening the abstracts press the "Continue Screening!" button. More details on the screening process below.
  7. The final section "Conflict Analysis" provides the leader with a report that compares what claim each of the reviewers extracted from the article abstracts and whether they match or conflict.

 We hope that the review tool is useful. Please feel free to provide feedback and recommended improvements.