We are incredibly excited to share the full release of MetaReviewer with the evidence synthesis community. Over the last year, thanks to great feedback from our Beta version users and the hard work of our development team, we’ve added several new features to the platform. In our inaugural blog post on MetaReviewer’s new Learn page, we highlight some of the most exciting new features included in MetaReviewer’s full release. Whether you’re new to MetaReviewer or a returning user, we hope the features help streamline your next synthesis.
Reconciling multiple reviews
Double coding is best practice for evidence synthesis. Reconciling those reviews, however, can be tedious and time consuming. MetaReviewer is now equipped to help you with that process. When you have multiple coding form entries for a study, you can now create a reconcile review. This review quickly shows you where discrepancies exist:
And allows you to easily select which response should be carried forward to the final set of codes:
When exporting data, MetaReviewer will only export the reconciled reviews, so your final coding decisions will be automatically reflected in the analysis dataset.
Full-text Screening
You can now start using MetaReviewer even earlier in your synthesis process with new functionality that supports study eligibility screening. We’ve added a new panel to the Study Page that allows you to assign studies to screen and update screening progress.
These fields are also reflected in your list of studies. With this addition, you will be able to track a study’s entire path through your meta-analysis, from screening through full text coding.
Estimating effect sizes
In our initial codebook templates, we tried to anticipate the information you’d need to extract to calculate a wide range of effect sizes. We then figured, why not just handle the effect size calculating for you? It’s the least we could do after you’ve hunted down and/or author queried so many numbers. MetaReviewer now automates effect size calculations and shows you effect size information in real time.
At the moment, MetaReviewer is set up to calculate 13 different types of standardized mean differences. When you enter the necessary information to calculate one of these effect sizes,
MetaReviewer automatically adds two columns to your data, one showing the calculated effect size and the other showing the variance of that effect size.
We are working on expanding these calculations to more effect size types. Our goal is to eventually have MetaReviewer calculate all the effect size options that are included in our standard Effect Size codebook section.
Improved project management
Finally, we’ve added some new tools to help you with project management. First, you can now search for specific projects on the Projects Portal page, as well as filter projects by your role.
We’ve also added an Assignments tab to each project. In this tab, you will see the current list of tasks (e.g., screening, coding, or reconciling) that are assigned to you. You can see a list of completed tasks, as well, to help you track your progress and contributions to a study.
MetaReviewer's General Glow Up
Finally, if you’re a returning user, you’ll notice lots of little changes to MetaReviewer’s appearance and user interface. In addition to the big new features listed above, we’ve made the platform more user friendly throughout. In particular, we’ve smoothed out some of the issues with navigating large, complex codebook sections. We hope these changes help you to spend less time scrolling and more time coding and synthesizing.
