Synthesis

Synthesis is a software application for conducting scoping, systematic and regular literature reviews.  Synthesis focuses on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of conducting literature reviews through automating manual processes and enhancing the workflow.  Synthesis is available for Windows, Mac and a Java application that can be run on any platform.
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Features of Synthesis
  • Designed for Literature, Scoping and Systematic Reviews
  • Primary and Secondary reviewer capability (automated Kappa scores)
  • Automated high-lighting of key words in abstracts and PDFs
  • Automated downloading of PDFs
  • Extraction of comments and high-lighted text from PDFs
  • Integrated data collection interface (spreadsheet style)
  • Integrated PDF viewer
  • Output in CSV (Microsoft Excel) format
  • Automatic generation of bibliographics through export to EndNote/Reference Manager capable file, BibTex, or Text-style bibliography.
  • Auto creation of columns based upon keyword filtering
Import Capabilities
  • PubMed
  • Ovid (Medline, Embase, Global Health, etc)
  • Web of Knowledge
  • Scopus
  • ProQuest
  • IEEE
  • Grey Literature
  • BibTex References (i.e. ACM or ISBN)
Export Capabilities
  • CSV (which can be imported into statistical analysis software such as Excel, R, Stata, SAS, etc)
  • RIS Format (which can be imported into EndNote, Reference Manageer, RefWorks, etc)
  • BibTex

Literature Review

A Literature Review is focused around a specific topic and is not as structured as a conducting a Scoping or a Systematic Review.  Literature reviews are most often used supplementing the writing of papers or reports.

Scoping Review

A Scoping Review is conducted to provide an overview of the literature published around a specific topic.  An example of this may be Patient Flow Simulations which may result in describing the various type of simulation methods (discrete event, multi agent, etc) presented in the literature, what domains (hospital, wards, etc) simulation has been applied to and what type of issues may have been addressed (re-admissions, transfers, capacity).  

Systematic Review

A Systematic Review is a formal method for answering a specific question in the medical arena.  An example of this might be the effect on Length of Stay using Patient Flow Simulations.  Two researchers would review all the abstracts related to a search and determine if those abstracts met some criteria.  Then those selected abstracts would be used for selecting the full text paper (PDF) and see if the criteria is further met.  Kappa scores are calculated at each stage.  A description of the literature, and potentially a meta analysis is conducted.

Citation

Yergens D, Ray J, Doig CJ.  KSv2: Application for Enhancing Scoping and Systematic Reviews.  American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2012 Annual Symposium.  November 2012.  (poster)