Version 4.11.2.0 contains a brand new implementation of the still experimental (on invitation) features leveraging the Microsoft Academic Graph dataset (version 4 only), as well as a few new features and a range of bugfixes. Concurrently, we are also releasing new features for the online shop, where it is now possible to purchase a lump sum and then distribute it to accounts and reviews as/when needed. The online shop now also allows us to "pre-charge" a purchase with a sum of money agreed with us, so to pay for services we already provided (instead of having to use the "invoice" route).
[Update: 10/05/2020] Version 4.11.2.1 contains a number of fixes and enhancements to the Microsoft Academic living systematic review workflow. Concurrently, the Database server has been upgraded, to better handle the ever-increasing workload.
EPPI-Reviewer 4, new features
Microsoft Academic. We are now rolling out to our production servers some features that we have been testing for a long time, but will now test ‘live’ before making them available to all users. We will now have direct access to the weekly updated Microsoft Academic dataset in EPPI-Reviewer, and will start by using this to help us to update our ‘living’ COVID-19 map of the evidence. The machine learning pipeline automatically ‘learns’ the scope of a review (or map) and suggests new – potentially relevant – records each week. We will evaluate the performance of this for a few weeks through a ‘research and development’ interface which has been built for this purpose. All going well, we will open up this feature for more users in the near future. (More info is here)
Functionality to associate codes to "external" concepts (controlled vocabularies, ontologies, etc.). It is now possible to enable this feature on a per-coding-tool basis, which will allow users to assign a URL to a code. This is a very early implementation that does nothing more than recording the URL associations, and is currently used for experimental projects; we expect that this feature will grow and become fully supported at a later stage.
EPPI-Reviewer 4 bugfix (affecting comparisons on both versions)
For reasons we failed to discover for much too long, in version 4 it was possible to side-step a series a crucial steps that were designed to prevent the possibility of coding the same item with the same code twice. Specifically, the EPPI-Reviewer 4 user interface is designed to prevent users from clicking a code checkbox (which sends the "please add this code to this item" to the EPPI-Reviewer server) and then click it again, but before the first command is completed. In version 4, this check had an elusive bug, which manifests itself only when the first command takes an unusually long time to complete. The effect of this bug is that it was sometimes possible to add the same code to the same item twice. This error was usually "silent" and inconsequential, however, it had the side effect of breaking comparisons, because they rely on the assumption that the same code can be added to a single reference only once (per person). Thus, comparisons that included affected items failed to work and required our manual intervention to remove the data duplication. We believe we have identified the bug that made this problem possible and have re-written the mechanism that "disables" the coding tools while coding data is being saved and retrieved. We therefore expect this problem to be permanently resolved. [In EPPI-Reviewer Web, the mechanism that "disables" the coding tools while coding data is being transmitted is entirely different and we believe immune from the original problem.]
EPPI-Reviewer Web, new features
It is now possible to move a code, along with all its children, to a new position within its coding-tool. This feature is available via the "Edit code" menu in the "Edit coding tools" page. The same feature is available via drag and drop in EPPI-Reviewer 4.
When a code contains a reference URL (see the Version 4 new feature above), this URL will be shown (read-only) when editing a code (in "Edit Coding Tools" and "Item details" windows).
EPPI-Reviewer Web, enhancement
Codes within a coding tool have an "order" property, controlling the order in which they appear amongst their siblings, in their coding tool. This value can sometimes become wrong (for example, two sibling codes can sometimes have the same order value), which in turn makes moving codes a bit unpredictable (in both versions). In version 4, this value is visible and editable, so users can fix it themselves. From this release, EPPI-Reviewer Web uses a different strategy: it will automatically detect problems in the "order" values and silently fix them whenever necessary to ensure that a given change to a coding tool will produce the expected results (thus ensuring the "moving of codes" is predictable). This happens silently in the background, so users are unlikely to notice it.
EPPI-Reviewer Web, bugfixes
Version 4.11.0 introduced a new bug: when creating a new code, the new code would be created, but would not appear until the user closed the "edit coding tools" window. This problem is now resolved.
We also discovered that, on very rare occasions, it was possible for users to "receive" the wrong list of reviews. Trying to open any one of such reviews would result in an "access denied" error, forcing the user to log off and on again. As far as we know this behaviour was never observed by end users, but we discovered the possibility and fixed the issue with this release. Additionally, the new system loads the list of reviews "on demand", which also ensures it is always up to date.
Both EPPI-Reviewer versions, enhancement
A quick round of performance analysis flagged the procedure used to "allocate items to codes randomly" as one of the more computationally expensive procedure (makes it unnecessarily slow). We thus spent some time to find better ways to implement the same feature. The procedure has been largely rewritten and now runs faster, from "just about faster" in the case of small allocations (involving small numbers of new codes and items) to up to seven times faster (for larger allocations).
Account Manager and Online Shop
New Feature: purchasing credit
The online shop now allows to purchase a "credit" lump sum (in £5 increments) and the account manager now includes a brand new system to "distribute" credit to reviews and personal accounts, as and when needed. This could be useful to users who happen to have some money to "invest", but don't already have definitive plans about who, what and when should be licensed in the future. Each credit purchase is associated with a viewable log of how and when it was applied to accounts and reviews.
New Feature: settling a debt
Similarly, we (the people at EPPI-Support) can now create an "Outstanding fee" record and associate it with a given account. When the account holder visits our online shop, if an outstanding fee is present, it will be automatically added to their present bill. This feature allows us to do some work or apply some subscriptions in advance, and then ask for a payment through the shop (useful when invoicing isn't a user-requirement).
Account Manager: bugfix
In the "Purchase" tab, it is possible to view a list of past purchases. However, a bug meant that asking to see or download the details of any past purchase would always fetch the details for the last purchase. This problem is now fixed. This same feature now also fully supports "credit" and "debit" purchases.
Future plans
These always take the form of a wishlist (if things pan out as planned, if no more urgent needs arise, etc.), but for now, this is what we can say. We expect to solidify the Microsoft Academic Graph features and gradually expand their availability as well as making them available in EPPI-Reviewer Web. The next existing feature we plan to port into EPPI-Reviewer Web is the ability to configure and monitor progress for Priority Screening. We also hope to release a brand new version of the deduplicating and grouping algorithm (both versions), which should be much better in all aspects (better precision, better usability, more aware of already applied coding) and, importantly, won't generate the dreaded "overlapping groups".
To account for the rapid growth of user base that we are currently experiencing, we also plan to upgrade our database server, which should deliver better performance to both EPPI-Reviewer versions, we expect to do this on Sunday 10 May (this will require some downtime).