Version 4.9.0.0 is a major upgrade: it significantly expands the Coding-App, following our current plan (more details here and here). What used to be a small "coding-only" App, written to support modern web-browsers has grown into a bigger application able to support many EPPI-Reviewer functionalities. As before, the App uses the same data as EPPI-Reviewer 4 (Silverlight version): thus, users can now use it to carry out many common EPPI-Reviewer activities, without having to load the full Silverlight version. Do note that EPPI-Reviewer 4 (Silverlight) does contain many functionalities that we could not include in the Web App for this release; we are planning to keep adding new functionalities to it, on a slightly faster schedule.

EPPI-Reviewer (Web App):

The web app now allows you to open a review in two different ways. Clicking on the review name brings users to the (new) full interface; users can also click on the "Coding UI" button to access the latest version of the "Coding-App", which is now better optimised for mobile/small screen usage. The coding UI replicates most of the "Coding-only" UI of EPPI-Reviewer. As before, the full user interface is not available to users that have the "Coding-only" role in a given review. Most new features appear on the full interface.

New Features (Full User Interface):

Review Home.

The web app introduces a new "Review Home" tab, which acts as a summary of the review and will eventually replicate features that are currently available via the "Review Info" (Silverlight version). This tab also provides access to the work allocations assigned to the current user, the priority screening list of items (inside the "My work" area), the list of imported sources and the list of reviews (allows you to change review). The toolbar on the top allows users to access the "import items" functionality, the new facility for editing CodeSets and the "Import CodeSets" wizard.

References tab.

The structure of this tab follows closely the current (main) "Documents" tab of the Silverlight version and should feel familiar to most EPPI-Reviewer users. Unlike the older version, the default page size is now limited to 100 items, as we found that bigger lists may impact performance on some browsers/platforms. The page size can still be changed to contain a maximum of 4000 items, which will definitely have a performance cost, but might be useful in some rare scenarios. The toolbar on top of the tab reproduces some of the features present on the equivalent toolbar of the Silverlight version, such as the quick coding report and the "Automatically Generated codes" (Lingo3G clusters). It also includes some functionalities previously available via the mouse right-click, which isn't easy to use on touch-screens. This screen also allows you to access the lists of included, excluded and deleted references (items). The ability to create custom Machine-Learning models is also present on this toolbar ("moved" from the "Codes" toolbar).

Frequencies, CrossTabs and Search tabs.

These three tabs replicate the functionalities of the corresponding Silverlight tabs in an almost complete manner (what isn't included yet is the ability to export to Excel tables).

Item Details page.

As before, clicking the "Go" button for a given reference (item) in the References tab opens up a different page where users can add codes to a single reference. This page supports the same activities as the "Coding UI" version: adding/removing codes and the "Info box" text. It also allows you to download PDFs. Unlike the Coding UI version, this page is not specifically optimised to work well on small screens.

Import Items page.

This page allows users to import items and supports the same activities as the Silverlight version: import different tagged file formats (RIS, Medline, etc.), import from PubMed, edit source information (search string, origin, etc.) and permanently deleting a source.

Edit Codes page.

This is a new page that doesn't have a corresponding screen in the Silverlight version. In order to support editing codetrees in a touch-friendly manner, editing of codesets is currently possible only via this dedicated page. We expect that we will add some (selected) editing activities from the "Item Details" page in the foreseeable future. Copying and pasting entire code-tree branches is currently not supported.

Import CodeSets pages:

This page supports all the activities available in the "Setup CodeSets Wizard" window in the Silverlight version.

Build Model page.

This page ("Build Model" button in the references tab) reproduces the Machine-Learning, "build your own module"  features presented in the "Machine-Learning classifier" window (in the Silverlight version, available from the "Codes" tab toolbar in the main screens).

New Features (Coding UI)

This release includes a new way to support coding on small screens. Instead of forcing users to scroll up and down (from the item details to the code-tree), on small screens the codes can now slide over the item details (on demand). We believe this will allow you to perform time consuming coding activities (such as screening) in a much faster and comfortable way, even on phones and small tablets.

Bugfix (Coding UI)

The Item details window was frequently showing the wrong list of uploaded documents (this bug was fixed on the fly in early December).

Known limitations:

For technical reasons, we could perform only limited testing on the Microsoft Edge browser. We know that some layout issues appear specifically with this browser and we are also aware that the application itself is relatively slower / less responsive. For the time being, we recommend accessing the new App with (any) other modern browser: we expect the application to work smoothly on Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

EPPI-Reviewer (both versions):

As promised, we continue to fully support the Silverlight version, which will receive significant new features as and when we will develop them. For this release, the Silverlight version received one new feature and bug-fix.

New feature: Cochrane RCT classifier.

We are pleased to include the official version of the Cochrane RCT classifier in this release. This version of the classifier has been calibrated using the McMaster Hedges dataset in a similar way to as described here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jrsm.1287. It returns two result sets: one of records which _may_ describe RCTs - and if you want to be sure you're not missing relevant studies, then you should look at these; and one which is highly unlikely to contain RCTs. Its recall over all 94,000 included studies in Cochrane Reviews is around 99.5%. We have also retained the older RCT classifier, which simply returns a 'score'. Many users use the cutoff threshold of 10 when using this classifier and while it hasn't been evaluated to the same extent as the new one, this is usually a safe threshold when classifying records from PubMed and Embase.

EPPI-Reviewer (Silverlight):

Bugfix: in item-details, coding record tab, the coding data associated with Arms wasn't presented correctly when running a comparison report. This problem is now fixed.

Enhancement: in the "Document details" window, "Study arms" tab, it's now possible to delete arms.

Future releases:

In the next couple of months we plan to introduce some "Web-only" new features as well as continue reproducing important functionality of the Silverlight version. New additions include a new fully integrated and interactive Help feature as well as a feedback module (to report impressions, suggestions and errors - directly from the App itself). We expect to add the following existing features as well: support for Cochrane licensing/reviews, Editing Arms information, better reporting (including export to Excel), managing/creating work allocations, some (initial) support for comparisons and reconciliation.