In this guest blog post Andrew Horne, Project Manager in EDINA shares information about EDINA’s recent work on automating systematic reviews.
EDINA is a world class centre for digital expertise and is based at the University of Edinburgh and are specialists in developing and delivering digital products including large-scale online services, mobile apps and digital tools for education. Our expertise includes geospatial and satellite data, computational learning, text and data mining, e-preservation and machine learning.
EDINA have been working with the Centre for Supporting Evidence-Based Interventions in Livestock (SEBI) in the Royal Dick School of Veterinary Medicine on the automation of systematic reviews. Performing literature reviews for the Gates Foundation, SEBI found that using machine learning techniques to do data mining on the literature databases could turn a three month manual effort into one taking only three weeks – further automation is seeking to turn that into three days!
As a trial the same approach was tried with the Microfluidics department in the School of Engineering. This showed good results, and demonstrates that the technology is quite transferrable.
EDINA are interested in hearing from anyone who is involved in doing systematic reviews on a regular basis, with a view to examining the possibilities for automation. The approach is likely most effective for anyone performing literature reviews involving data mining from databases like Google Scholar and PubMed, but we are interested in speaking to anyone in the University who might benefit from automation.
Please contact Andrew Horne andrew.horne2@ed.ac.uk for further information.
Further information about EDINA
EDINA have over twenty years’ experience and a proven track-record of collaborating on innovative projects and service delivery across the full digital lifecycle; employing an agile, customer centric approach, to design, develop, test and deploy scalable digital solutions. An organisation rich in data expertise, we work closely with customers in the private, public and education sectors.
You can find out more about EDINA on their website:
