A clustering approach for topic filtering within systematic literature reviews.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Weißer T
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7078380 | biostudies-literature | 2020
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
A clustering approach for topic filtering within systematic literature reviews.
Weißer Tim T Saßmannshausen Till T Ohrndorf Dennis D Burggräf Peter P Wagner Johannes J
MethodsX 20200222
Within a systematic literature review (SLR), researchers are confronted with vast amounts of articles from scientific databases, which have to be manually evaluated regarding their relevance for a certain field of observation. The evaluation and filtering phase of prevalent SLR methodologies is therefore time consuming and hardly expressible to the intended audience. The proposed method applies natural language processing (NLP) on article meta data and a k-means clustering algorithm to automatic ...[more]
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Project description:Systematic reviews require expert reviewers to manually screen thousands of citations in order to identify all relevant articles to the review. Active learning text classification is a supervised machine learning approach that has been shown to significantly reduce the manual annotation workload by semi-automating the citation screening process of systematic reviews. In this paper, we present a new topic detection method that induces an informative representation of studies, to improve the performance of the underlying active learner. Our proposed topic detection method uses a neural network-based vector space model to capture semantic similarities between documents. We firstly represent documents within the vector space, and cluster the documents into a predefined number of clusters. The centroids of the clusters are treated as latent topics. We then represent each document as a mixture of latent topics. For evaluation purposes, we employ the active learning strategy using both our novel topic detection method and a baseline topic model (i.e., Latent Dirichlet Allocation). Results obtained demonstrate that our method is able to achieve a high sensitivity of eligible studies and a significantly reduced manual annotation cost when compared to the baseline method. This observation is consistent across two clinical and three public health reviews. The tool introduced in this work is available from https://nactem.ac.uk/pvtopic/.
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Project description:Dromedary camels are the preferable livestock species in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Most of the world's camel populations are managed under a subsistence/extensive system maintained by migratory pastoralists but intensification is getting more frequent. Even though recently the welfare of camels has been receiving more attention, in many countries there are no regulations to protect their health and welfare. The objectives of this article were to explore the main research topics related to camel welfare, their distribution over time and to highlight research gaps. A literature search was performed to identify records published in English from January 1980 to March 2023 on Dromedary camel welfare via Scopus®, using "Camel welfare," "Camel behaviour," "She-camel" and "Camel management" as search words. A total of 234 records were retained for analysis after automatic and manual screening procedures. Descriptive statistics, text mining (TM) and topic analysis (TA) were performed. The result shows that even though there were fluctuations between years, records on camel welfare have increased exponentially over time. Asia was the region where most of the corresponding authors were located. The first five most frequent words were, "milk," "calv," "behaviour," "femal," and "breed," the least frequent word was "stabl." TA resulted in the five most relevant topics dealing with "Calf management and milk production," "Camel health and management system," "Female and male reproduction," "Camel behaviour and feeding," and "Camel welfare." The topics that contained the oldest records were "female and male reproduction" and "camel health and management system" (in 1980 and 1983, respectively), while the topic named "camel behaviour and feeding" had the first article published in 2000. Overall, even though topics related to camel behaviour and welfare are receiving more attention from academia, research is still needed to fully understand how to safeguard welfare in Dromedary camels.
| S-EPMC10665734 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundArticle summaries' information and structure may influence researchers/clinicians' decisions to conduct deeper full-text analyses. Specifically, abstracts of systematic reviews (SRs) and meta-analyses (MA) should provide structured summaries for quick assessment. This study explored a method for determining the methodological quality and bias risk of full-text reviews using abstract information alone.MethodsSystematic literature searches for SRs and/or MA about psoriasis were undertaken on MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane database. For each review, quality, abstract-reporting completeness, full-text methodological quality, and bias risk were evaluated using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses for abstracts (PRISMA-A), Assessing the Methodological Quality of Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR), and ROBIS tools, respectively. Article-, author-, and journal-derived metadata were systematically extracted from eligible studies using a piloted template, and explanatory variables concerning abstract-reporting quality were assessed using univariate and multivariate-regression models. Two classification models concerning SRs' methodological quality and bias risk were developed based on per-item and total PRISMA-A scores and decision-tree algorithms. This work was supported, in part, by project ICI1400136 (JR). No funding was received from any pharmaceutical company.ResultsThis study analysed 139 SRs on psoriasis interventions. On average, they featured 56.7% of PRISMA-A items. The mean total PRISMA-A score was significantly higher for high-methodological-quality SRs than for moderate- and low-methodological-quality reviews. SRs with low-bias risk showed higher total PRISMA-A values than reviews with high-bias risk. In the final model, only 'authors per review > 6' (OR: 1.098; 95%CI: 1.012-1.194), 'academic source of funding' (OR: 3.630; 95%CI: 1.788-7.542), and 'PRISMA-endorsed journal' (OR: 4.370; 95%CI: 1.785-10.98) predicted PRISMA-A variability. Reviews with a total PRISMA-A score < 6, lacking identification as SR or MA in the title, and lacking explanation concerning bias risk assessment methods were classified as low-methodological quality. Abstracts with a total PRISMA-A score ≥ 9, including main outcomes results and explanation bias risk assessment method were classified as having low-bias risk.ConclusionsThe methodological quality and bias risk of SRs may be determined by abstract's quality and completeness analyses. Our proposal aimed to facilitate synthesis of evidence evaluation by clinical professionals lacking methodological skills. External validation is necessary.
| S-EPMC5747101 | biostudies-literature