EPPI-Reviewer 4: software for research synthesis

Systematic review

EPPI-Reviewer 4 has the functionality to help manage your systematic review through all stages of the process from bibliographic management, screening, coding and right through to synthesis.

It manages references, stores PDF files, facilitates qualitative and quantitative analyses and allows easy export of review data to enable use with other software programmes.

The software allows multiple concurrent users to access the system and being web-based allows members of a review group to be located in different geographic locations. 

Reference management

• Managing the thousands of references that often result from comprehensive searches of electronic databases
• Importing references in a wide variety of 'tagged' formats incl. direct searching of resources such as PubMed and Microsoft Academic
• Duplicate checking using 'fuzzy logic'. (Potential duplicates can be checked manually and / or automatically classified as duplicates, depending on how similar they are.)
• Document storage: store the original document file (such as pdf, doc etc) along with the study record.

Study classification and data extraction

• Flexible coding schemas for classifying studies:
  • Inclusion / exclusion / eligibility criteria;
  • Codes for descriptive 'mapping' of research activity.
  • Codes to capture detailed information about a study.
• Concurrent multi-user classification: multiple users can classify studies independently and then compare their results; EPPI-Reviewer 4 assists through the process, producing discrepancy reports and an interface to facilitate the process of agreeing final decisions.
• Bulk application / removal of codes to selected studies
• Calculation of common measures of effect (odds ratios, risk ratios, risk differences, standardized mean differences, mean differences) from a variety of statistics (2 x 2 tables, means, standard deviations, confidence intervals, p, t and r values).
• Text mining: automatic term recognition and document clustering.

Synthesis

• Running meta-analyses (fixed and random effects models); calculating I-squared and supporting sub-group analyses using analog to the anova
• A powerful search engine enabling users to search by categories and text and combine searches using Boolean terms
• Producing reports of categorical, numeric and textual data in a wide variety of formats from frequency reports, crosstabs and full-text reports, to tabular summary reports and summary statistics of numeric data
• Text mining functionality. Automatic document clustering, using text mining, is one way of describing the range of studies you have identified at the click of a button. Text mining can assist with searching by identifying significant terms in the documents you have already included.
• Inductive coding functionality. This allows line by line coding of textual data and organising and structuring these codes graphically into ‘conceptual relationship diagrams to display analytic and descriptive themes found through inductive coding.
• Fulltext reference searching using the uploaded pdfs.
• Diagrams to summarise e.g. qualitative syntheses and theories of change for interventions.

Review Management

• The ability to create an unlimited number of non-shareable reviews.
• Allocation of classification tasks (e.g. screening / data extraction) to individual users.
• Work progress reporting.
• Individual reviewer permissions (forthcoming)
• Review flow charts which update automatically (e.g. with counts of how many studies have been included / excluded according to which criterion in order to generate PRISMA flow-diagrams).
• Easy export of review data to enable use with other software programmes and to enable long term independent storage of data.