Embase screeningUsing technology to harness the

wisdom of the crowd

#CochraneTech20th September 2014 Hyderabad, India

The Embase project

Mission: identify all RCTs in Embase and feed them into CENTRAL

Team: Gordon Dooley, Julie Glanville, Anna Noel-Storr

Feeding time

CENTRALHelp make CENTRAL the Go To place for

all RCTs

“…the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by

soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and

especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees…”

CENTRAL

How: Let’s use crowdsourcing

Need rapid ‘on-boarding’Need in-built feedback mechanismNeed in-built quality assurance measures

The screening tool, the way in which guidance is delivered and the way screeners, and us, can evaluate performance is all reliant on how we harness the technology…

How: Let’s use crowdsourcing

Rapid ‘on-boarding’

‘dive on in’

The screening tool

You have to make one of three decisions on each record

1. Simplicity

2. Helpful highlights

We’ve highlighted some key terms and phrases: yellow highlights indicate that the record may be describing an RCT

2. Helpful highlights

Red highlights indicate that the record is likely to be a Reject

3. You are not alone

Two’s company! There is currently one other person screening

Stalwart! You are the only person screening

We have a crowd! There are currently two other people screening

We’re all at it! There are currently three other people screening

4. We are doing well

Sense of progression and orientation

601Signed up

68,465Citations

2459RCTs/q-RCTs

5. You are doing well

RCT RCT RCT

Reject Reject Reject

Unsure

CENTRAL

Bin

Resolver

Using Tech to support new methods

Ux

“Easy to navigate”

“It is so easy to read! And use!”“Really clear and user friendly”

Love it!

Ux: the highlights are the highlight

Makes it quicker to spot the keys issues

In a mass of words, it helps locate the information that I should be searching for

Immediately shows me words that give me a

"first impression"Aside from the actual words that are being highlighted,

it draws your eye to the sentence in which the term appears too, which is usually what you want

It serves as a simple reminder of exclusion criteria without having to open a separate tab/page to review whether a paper should be included or not

The Cochrane eco system

CENTRAL

RCTs from Embase

The Cochrane ecosystem

CENTRAL

RCTs from anywhere

The Cochrane ecosystem

But while we still need people…