Version 4.3.0.0 is major release and the result of a long behind the scenes effort. The highlight of this release is a brand new interface, called "coding only". Some significant changes have been applied to the duplicate checking interface, in order to aid, and significantly speed up, manual checking.

'Coding only' interface:

This is a completely new feature, which has two parts:

1. 'Coding only' user interface. This will provide access to a "limited" version of EPPI-Reviewer. In the coding-only mode, users can:
 - Load the lists of references that have been allocated to them.
 - Assign codes to such references.
 - Change the access mode and open a review with the standard interface (if allowed).
 - Change the review they are using.
 - All other functionalities are not available in this mode.
This first part allows everyone to work on a coding assignment without having to understand/deal with all the other functionalities. The new interface is available to all users for all their reviews. We hope people will find it useful, particularly when dealing with heavy workloads.

2. Assigning 'coding only' role to review members
Review administrators can (reversibly) assign the "coding only" role to review members. This is done through the Account Manager and will prevent that user from accessing the specific review with the standard (full) interface. The purpose is to limit their actions to the 'coding only' activities listed above. In other words, review administrators can award limited permissions to some reviewers. Those reviewers will not be able to edit data (other than their own data extraction / screening codes) and cannot see what other people have entered (if the code-set is in "multiple user" mode and the coding for a given item has not been completed).

This second part allows for some important new functionalities:
(i) It will be possible to conduct properly blind double (or triple) coding exercises. Assigning the "coding only" mode to reviewers will effectively prevent them from sneaking across to see what codes other people have applied.
(ii) It will be possible to hire people for coding-only duties. Effectively preventing them from seeing and modifying anything but the coding of items that have been explicitly assigned to them (of course, this means that "coding only" users will not be able to change a code-set in any way).

Duplicates checking.

The graphical interface was revised and enhanced in order to aid visual inspection, so to allow to identify real duplicates in an easier and faster way.
In particular:
The master item fields are now arranged exactly as the fields of groups members, but more importantly, the differences between the master item and the currently selected group member are evaluated and highlighted in real-time.
Whenever a field (Title, Journal, Authors, etc.) is different, the text on the master item will be highlighted with four different background hues. The brighter the hue, the larger is the difference detected. This means that items that don't highlight any master item field are identical to the master. Where a highlight is present, the highlighting system will allow users to immediately spot the differences and evaluate them rapidly.
If a field is empty in either the master or group member, it will be highlighted with the lighter hue, in order to show that there is a difference, and hint that this difference is likely to be relatively not important: depending on how an item was found and imported, some fields may have been missed (typically the "pages" or "month" fields), this usually depends on the import route and does not depend on a real-difference between items.

We also applied some layout optimisations: these are designed to speed up manual checking, and/or to make sure all information can be seen even if the browser window is very small.
- The list of manually added items in now resizable
- Optimised the layout of the "add new group" wizard.
- The first time the list of groups is loaded, the program automatically finds the first unchecked group and activates it.
- On subsequent list changes (refresh, delete group, or as a result of a search) EPPI-Reviewer will try to keep selected the original item. If the already selected group is not in the new list, then the first non completed group will be picked, if all current groups are completed, then the first one is selected.
- After marking a group member, the interface will automatically select the first unchecked  group member (if any).

Other Changes:

Codes tree: in the main screen, "codes" tab and in the left column of "Document Details": the "description" box that shows at the bottom of the codes tree is now resizable.

Finally: during the last months, we identified and fixed (without the need of publishing a new version) a few minor bugs/annoyances:

1) "Search on Terms" (window "Find items like these" button in the main screen) was timing out when using a long list of terms. This is now "optimised" and every new search should complete much faster.
2) On the same window, the "Search on terms" was failing if the user's PC regional settings were set to use the comma as "decimal separator".
3) Crosstabs were picking excluded/deleted/shadow items. They should count only included items, so this is what they do now.
4) Some reports, were sometimes including the wrong "Coded text" (portions of the full-text assigned to a particular code). This depended on some unusual documents (we only know of a couple of examples) and is now fixed.
5) When removing a code from an item, if the code was also applied to some full-text, an error would be shown. This is now fixed.

Conclusion:

Some other major technological improvements have been completed in order to enable most of the changes listed above. This required a lot of work that does not have any visible direct effect on EPPI-Reviewer. However, since this phase is over, we now expect a period of relatively rapid development, and hope to be able to publish some more significant improvements relatively soon. We also wish to thank all the people that provided feedback and/or collaborated with us to identify some of the issues fixed in the latest months (and before). We appreciate your help!