Core Smart Tags is an AI Extraction tool for commonly extracted elements in research projects: Population, Interventions/Comparators, & Outcomes (PICOs), Study Type, Study Location, and Study Size.
There are several advantages of Core Smart Tags:
- Immediate categorization of all studies when you add a Search, which can assist with iterative search strategy or screening
- Automatic Tag hierarchy generation and extraction
- Additional visuals for drilling down on interpreting your evidence
The tool currently extracts from Study Abstracts and is incorporated in several parts of the AutoLit workflow including Search Exploration for exploring these elements based on custom concepts, Tagging for auto-generated recommendations and extraction of these elements, and Dashboard for display of these data as cards.
Search Exploration #
Search Exploration allows you to input concepts, explore the literature and generate a search query to finalize in your nest. To assist in the exploration and query building, after inputting your concepts, view the most commonly reported PICOs, view a Study Type sunburst diagram, a Study Location choropleth/map (see below screenshot), a Study Size histogram, and an Acronym dictionary.
Interacting with each of these Exploration pages, you’ll be able to view associated records on the right hand side where you can do a deeper dive of specific records’ abstracts.
Note: While these cannot be directly incorporated into the search query, once the search is finalized, filters can be applied in Study Inspector to view and apply bulk actions to subsets of studies!
Tagging/Data Extraction #
Once a search has been finalized and records have been imported into your nest, Core Smart Tags switch from being your Search strategy tool to providing structure and time savings to your data extraction. Core Smart Tags are automatically generated for each study upon search import and can be added to your tag hierarchy in the Tagging Configuration page by clicking the “Core” button.
This opens a modal to input your research question, generate a hierarchy of PICOs, Study Type, Location and Size (these are all selected by default but may be unchecked/checked depending on your preference) and either recommend evidence (default) or immediately extract this data from all studies in your nest. Simply uncheck “As Recommendations” if you’d like all data to be extracted immediately. Otherwise you will have to apply the recommended tags yourself.
This auto-generates a hierarchy of concepts for you, which can be edited as you see fit. Regardless of how you choose to use Core Tags, each one comes into your nest pre-configured with a name, content type, and in some cases, child tags arranged hierarchically beneath them. By default, each root Core Tag will be configured as a question. Additionally, every aspect of Core Tags can be modified just like any other tag. This means you can add things like question type, descriptions, aliases, etc. to a Core Tag or a Core Tag’s child. Additionally, while Core Smart Tags generate recommendations or applied tags as soon as you add them to your hierarchy, you can of course override the individual applications in cases where the Core Smart Tags failed to find the correct answer.
Dashboard #
After tags have been applied, you may wish to present your data as was available in Search Exploration. In Dashboard Editor, you can add a “Tag” card to display:
- Tags as sunburst diagrams
- Tag: Study Location as a choropleth/map
- Tag: Study Size as a histogram
