Visual Analytics for Systematic Reviews According to PRISMA

Abstract

Systematic reviews play an essential role in various disciplines. Particularly, in biomedical sciences, systematic reviews according to a predefined schema and protocol are how related literature is analyzed. Although a protocol-based systematic review is replicable and provides the required information to reproduce each step and refine them, such a systematic review is time-consuming and may get complex. To face this challenge, automatic methods can be applied that support researchers in their systematic analysis process. The combination of artificial intelligence for automatic information extraction from scientific literature with interactive visualizations as a Visual Analytics system can lead to sophisticated analysis and protocoling of the review process. We introduce in this paper a novel Visual Analytics approach and system that enables researchers to visually search and explore scientific publications and generate a protocol based on the PRISMA protocol and the PRISMA statement.