revtools-package {revtools}

revtools: Tools to support reviews and evidence synthesis

Description

Researchers commonly need to summarize scientific information, a process known as 'evidence synthesis'. The first stage of a synthesis process (such as a systematic review or meta-analysis) is to download a list of references from academic search engines such as 'Web of Knowledge' or 'Scopus'. The traditional approach to systematic review is then to sort these data manually, first by locating and removing duplicated entries, and then screening to remove irrelevant content by viewing titles and abstracts (in that order). 'revtools' provides interfaces for each of these tasks. An alternative approach, however, is to draw on tools from machine learning to visualise patterns in the corpus. In this case, you can use 'revtools' to render ordinations of text drawn from article titles, keywords and abstracts, and interactively select or exclude individual references, words or topics.

Functions

Article screening

• screen_duplicates Screen for duplicates

• screen_titles Screen articles by title

• screen_abstracts Screen articles by abstract

• screen_topics Screen data by topic

Bibliographic methods

• read_bibliography Import bibliographic data

• write_bibliography Export bibliographic data

• bibliography-class Format for storing bibliographic data

• bibliography-methods Print, summary, as.bibliography, as.data.frame and [ methods for class 'bibliography'

• tag_lookup Lookup table for ris tag transformations

• merge_columns rbind two data.frames with different numbers of columns

• format_citation Return a clean citation from a bibliography or data.frame

• add_line_breaks Set a maximum character width for strings in a vector

Distributing tasks among a team

• allocate_effort Specify how to distribute screening effort among a team of reviewers

• distribute_tasks Split a dataset among a team of reviewers

• aggregate_tasks Combine screening results from a team of reviewers

Duplicate detection

• fuzz_functions Fuzzy string matching

• find_duplicates Locate potentially duplicated references

• extract_unique_references Return a data.frame with only 'unique' references

• screen_duplicates Screen for duplicates

Text mining

• revwords Stopwords used in revtools functions

• make_dtm Construct a Document-Term Matrix from bibliographic data

• run_topic_model Wrapper function for topic models

• screen_topics Screen data by topic