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HomeHomeUsing EPPI-Revi...Using EPPI-Revi...Questions about...Questions about...Exporting RIS with codesExporting RIS with codes
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16/07/2019 00:50
 

Hello, we are trying to export our EPPI-Reviewer references, including codes, to Zotero. It is easy to export our references as a RIS file, but the RIS file produced by EPPI doesn't contain any of our codes. If it was possible to include the codes under additional fields, we could import that field into one an unused field in Zotero. Is there any way to export the RIS with codes? Or anyway to put pieces together and achieve that as a final product? Thank you.

 
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16/07/2019 18:54
 

Dear Norman,

 

Unfortunately, there is no way to export your references as a RIS file with the associated coding records.

What may be possible is to run a coding report (or a configurable report created for the purpose), and save this as a spreadsheet. You may be able to get that into a format suitable for importing into Zotero. (It may be feasible to merge such a report with your RIS file, if we cannot edit the spreadsheet on its own to produce something that does what you need.)

I will investigate further and get back to you.

 

Kind regards,

EPPI Support

EPPISUpport@UCL.ac.uk 

 
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16/07/2019 20:58
 

Thanks, Zak.  Getting a report in CSV format with the article ID and codes would be one step (all codes could go into the same field, separated by line breaks). The next step woudl be to get the RIS into CSV format. Since EPPI doesn't do that, I would need to export from EPPI, import into Zotero, and reexport from Zotero as a CSV. Since the RIS exports from EPPI include the article ID, I could use a lookup formula in Excel to bring them both together. Of course, then I would need to figure out how to get it from CSV back into RIS format. I'm not sure how to do that just yet.

Or...maybe someone with EPPI could update the SQL for the RIS export to include the codes in an extra user-defined field (e.g., "U2"), the same way that the EEPI RIS export exports the article ID in user field 1 ("U1")? That would be much more straightforward and less prone to error.

Thanks again.

 
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20/07/2019 12:53
 

Hi Norman,

Article ID would be one thing, but all the coding attached to each reference could be problematic. (Unfortunately, additional development of EPPI Reviewer 4 is unlikey now anyway, with all focus being on completing existing features in our new version of EPPI Reviewer - ER-Web.) 

The coding record for a reference could be large and varied, so it would be difficult to create a catch-all system to cover all eventualities, and one that could always be understood by other programs using the usual RIS conventions...

One could perhaps do a frequency report for the codesets you are interested in, and then save each "band" of references separately, but your idea of merging RIS file information with coding reports via Excel seems a better one.

(It's feasible we will look at CSV to RIS conversion via Excel or script in the near future, as this could be generally useful. I will keep you updated on that particular detail! Do let us know how you get on with combining your RIS and coding info.)

Best wishes,

EPPI Support

 

 
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16/08/2019 15:18
 

Hello,

we have the same use-case: How do we get our data out of EPPI? We don't need to get all, but e.g. "included/excluded" in some measure would be good. Happy to ER-Web if needed.

We are using Zotero, where our whole bib resides. We assign a custom id to items, that we move into EPPI. 

We would then do the coding in EPPI, but need a way to get basic codes (relevance H/M/L) out of EPPI in a programmatic way. It just needs to include the custom id plus the codes.

We then use API interface for Zotero to add those extra codes as tags in Zotero.

Norma: If you're interested in how we access the API, see github There's both a plugin for Zotero that can assign unique ids (into Loc in Archive)  https://github.com/edtechhub/zotero-edtechhub as well as a command-line interface to push information back to Zotero: https://github.com/edtechhub/zotero-cli

 
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19/08/2019 12:20
 

Hello Björn,

apologies for the late reply. I've been thinking about this and I can suggest one thing that might help you out. In the Silverlight version there is an "ad-hoc" facility which produces a coding report in JSON format. This is specifically designed to do computer-driven analysis (currently used by two separate side-projects of ours) and, if you're happy to use the Zotero API, it's possible that you'll be able to "digest" the JSON reports and feed the result to the API itself.

Here is how to obtain a JSON report:

First, you'll want to obtain the list of references you're interested in, I'll assume you have your ways to get hold of this list. From the main "Documents" page, you would then select all documents in your list and click on the "Get coding report(s) for selected item(s) that have been completed". It's in the main toolbar two buttons on the right of the "printer" (Export bibliography) button.
You would then tick one or more coding tools (codesets) to indicate what coding data you're interested in, tick the "Export results as JSON text file" option and click "Get report(s)".

The resulting file starts with a "CodeSets" which represents the structure of the codesets in question, including name, description, IDs and their place within the coding tool tree. The file then includes a "References", which lists all the references that were selected, in the "Codes" field, you'll find a "flat" list of codes (from the coding tools that were selected) that have been applied to the reference in question. The Codes list includes an AttributeId which is used to "find" the code (and it's place) in the "CodeSets" section, as well as all data associated with it (including the text associated to the coding, from the full text-document, if any; field is "ItemAttributeFullTextDetails").

One word of warning: should you decide to use this facility, I must stress that it's quite possible that the JSON format might change (not dramatically) without warning. Likely changes are the addition of more fields, it's unlikely that we'll change the name or position of existing fields. This means that you should be careful when writing your own parsing solution: it should be designed to cope with the appearance of additional fields (which are likely to be irrelevant to your purpose).

We don't currently know when the JSON report will appear within the Web version of EPPI-Reviewer, it's in our plans, but not already explicitly scheduled for a planned release - sorry.

Should the JSON report not suit your needs, an alternative strategy which might even be easier is to export the coding via the new "Quick question report" available from the Web version (available as a sub-menu in the "References" tab, below "coding report"). This provides a very flexible way to export only the coding data that you're interested in. Output is an HTML table, with "decorations" designed to make it easy to import it in Excel (and from there, anywhere).

Hopefully, one of the two options will work for you. I hope this helps,
Sergio

 
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03/10/2019 02:55
 

Thank you for your suggestion about using the json export. This is closer to what I was looking for. I was able to bring this file into R (https://hendrikvanb.gitlab.io/2018/07...json_to_tibble/). The resulting nested dataframes makes for some rough sailing, but at least I was able to import the data. Thank you!

 
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