Automatic evidence retrieval for systematic reviews.
J Med Internet Res
; 16(10): e223, 2014 Oct 01.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-25274020
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND:
Snowballing involves recursively pursuing relevant references cited in the retrieved literature and adding them to the search results. Snowballing is an alternative approach to discover additional evidence that was not retrieved through conventional search. Snowballing's effectiveness makes it best practice in systematic reviews despite being time-consuming and tedious.OBJECTIVE:
Our goal was to evaluate an automatic method for citation snowballing's capacity to identify and retrieve the full text and/or abstracts of cited articles.METHODS:
Using 20 review articles that contained 949 citations to journal or conference articles, we manually searched Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) and identified 78.0% (740/949) of the cited articles that were present in the database. We compared the performance of the automatic citation snowballing method against the results of this manual search, measuring precision, recall, and F1 score.RESULTS:
The automatic method was able to correctly identify 633 (as proportion of included citations recall=66.7%, F1 score=79.3%; as proportion of citations in MAS recall=85.5%, F1 score=91.2%) of citations with high precision (97.7%), and retrieved the full text or abstract for 490 (recall=82.9%, precision=92.1%, F1 score=87.3%) of the 633 correctly retrieved citations.CONCLUSIONS:
The proposed method for automatic citation snowballing is accurate and is capable of obtaining the full texts or abstracts for a substantial proportion of the scholarly citations in review articles. By automating the process of citation snowballing, it may be possible to reduce the time and effort of common evidence surveillance tasks such as keeping trial registries up to date and conducting systematic reviews.Palavras-chave
Texto completo:
1
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Informática Médica
/
Armazenamento e Recuperação da Informação
Tipo de estudo:
Guideline
/
Prognostic_studies
Limite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
J Med Internet Res
Assunto da revista:
INFORMATICA MEDICA
Ano de publicação:
2014
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Austrália