The Automated Systematic Search Deduplicator (ASySD): a rapid, open-source, interoperable tool to remove duplicate citations in biomedical systematic reviews

BMC Biology

Methodology Article

Zsanett Bahor¹  Malcolm Macleod¹  Emily S. Sena¹  Kaitlyn Hair¹  Jing Liao¹ 

[1] Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK;

关键词: Automation tools;    Living systematic reviews;    Deduplication;    Systematic search;    Bibliographic database;    Citation manager;    EndNote;    Systematic reviews;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12915-023-01686-z

 received in 2022-04-14, accepted in 2023-08-21,  发布年份 2023

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundResearchers performing high-quality systematic reviews search across multiple databases to identify relevant evidence. However, the same publication is often retrieved from several databases. Identifying and removing such duplicates (“deduplication”) can be extremely time-consuming, but failure to remove these citations can lead to the wrongful inclusion of duplicate data. Many existing tools are not sensitive enough, lack interoperability with other tools, are not freely accessible, or are difficult to use without programming knowledge. Here, we report the performance of our Automated Systematic Search Deduplicator (ASySD), a novel tool to perform automated deduplication of systematic searches for biomedical reviews.MethodsWe evaluated ASySD’s performance on 5 unseen biomedical systematic search datasets of various sizes (1845–79,880 citations). We compared the performance of ASySD with EndNote’s automated deduplication option and with the Systematic Review Assistant Deduplication Module (SRA-DM).ResultsASySD identified more duplicates than either SRA-DM or EndNote, with a sensitivity in different datasets of 0.95 to 0.99. The false-positive rate was comparable to human performance, with a specificity of > 0.99. The tool took less than 1 h to identify and remove duplicates within each dataset.ConclusionsFor duplicate removal in biomedical systematic reviews, ASySD is a highly sensitive, reliable, and time-saving tool. It is open source and freely available online as both an R package and a user-friendly web application.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© BioMed Central Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2023

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