 Hi, my name is Mack Lejeuness and I'm an ecologist at the University of South Florida And I'm going to take a little bit of your time today to talk about this reference managing our package that I tried to crack a few years ago There's really three things I want to discuss The first is what's out there in terms of conventional reference managing tools to Talk about how these things don't quite fit for our research synthesis needs and then finally three I'll try to wrap up with a few aspirational goals on these tools Now I'm very much preaching to the choir here But if you've ever taken on a research synthesis project like a systematic review or meta analysis I feel like you see yourself as a virtuoso already with bibliographic information You've gotten your hands dirty many times searching bibliographic databases Pulling the references sorting organizing de-duplicating the entire research synthesis pipeline involves keeping track and managing citations references studies Now In terms of what tools are available out there there are a lot of neat things in terms of research synthesis that we could use But if you're approaching a research synthesis project for the first time You may not know what these tools are and you might try to shoehorn a lot of these bibliographic Reference managing tools that already exist into your research synthesis project. I remember years ago, right? Mandelae was the hot stuff the hot kid on the block and It being an absolute headache to try to shoehorn into a research synthesis. Yes, you can annotate Yes, you could code but really the UI the interface is not Designed to facilitate that process whatsoever Zoro is kind of emerging as a fantastic tool for organizing and Managing all these references and you could also kind of shoehorn it for many stages involved in the research synthesis project But my concern with these tools is it actually makes it difficult for us to navigate quickly what we want and It makes it difficult for us to read and understand the citations that we Have to continuously evaluate to be included in our research synthesis projects So here's what a typical bibliographic reference managing software does Right. It allows you to import The searches from databases. It allows you to search all these references Organize them in a nice way It allows you to export the citations if you're writing a manuscript It allows you to link up PDFs or The website associated with the study so you could trace back to that original study So you have access to more than just you know the citation and the metadata of the study, but you have the actual Copy of the publication Newer versions of these tools allow you to and actually annotate the PDF itself which is Iopening in terms of keeping track of many decisions that we do or coding criteria that we have to apply for our Synthesis projects, but for most users that are using this bibliographic software the goal is to really organize citations and Allow for the formatting of these citations to get plugged into a manuscript the interface of these things are very much managerial organizational organizational right there are tools and meant to Sort organize the bibliographic stuff but between you and me and anyone who's taken a research synthesis project our Relationship with each individual reference is way more intimate than the casual researcher pulling together references for a manuscript We need to have clear and clean access to each of the references to make them readable to understand whether or not they need to be included in our projects and to trace To have a tracking system involved in where they kind of fall out in that entire pipeline Maybe a study does not in get included in the final product in the final report, but at what stage did it get dropped? Having an interface that allows you to cleanly navigate that whole process I think would greatly facilitate our goals and needs into developing Clean reports that are readable and transparent all the way through the entire research of synthesis pipeline So years ago, I tried to crack this in R and R is not the Cleanest approach to do this kind of stuff clearly if you were taking this seriously you do it all in JavaScript, I suppose Shiny is fantastic for this But again, I feel like you could just skip That whole part and jump into JavaScript to organize the references My approach was using tickle-tk just because it provides a front-end a quickly generated front-end for R And so I'm going to continue using That gooey package to develop these tools further The challenge of course is that things are kind of Not nice looking, you know, you're dealing with a tool that was developed in Late 80s and 90s and there hasn't been much progression in terms of like a beauty and design But things are emerging that allow us to kind of make things look nice now So I feel like now is the time to kind of push these things further But when I first took a crack at it had it things were still kind of ugly But I feel like there's some neat aspects associated with the reference managing tool that sets it apart from these conventional Mandalay Zodero type approaches to managing references one is Rather than just having a tabulated relationship with all these citations every paper is openly and easily readable with all the toggling and coding criteria associated with it So the PDFs the coding decisions whether at what point In the research synthesis pipeline was it excluded or included and also links to the endpoints of the synthesis whether their effect sizes or just Their relationship in terms of where they get aggregated with other studies is all included wrapped up In how we're used to dealing with references, which is essentially just like a bibliographic list at the end of a publication So the whole UI is designed to make it look like a collection of references from the end of a publication So what you get is a readable citation and what gets tagged on the citation are all the coding criteria that were that were used to label the the study And of course you get quick access to the metadata and other effect size data that are associated with the study Finally also what's labeled with each individual study is where they belong in that entire research synthesis pipeline and whether or not you can trace back to its origin and any changes and modifications that occurred when we were trying to Push it through to create a report So aspirationally, I want to put more work into this reference managing tool but my views on what's a something that is That would facilitate a research synthesis project are often bizarre because I get more involved in Trying to develop tools rather than trying to complete a project as a whole So when I tried to record a giant youtube course of me doing a research synthesis project from a to z And post it on youtube right I needed a tool that allowed the viewers to see exactly what I was up to and so that was my motivation to create this visual UI for research synthesis to organize bibliographic information I think it's time for me to kind of push it further and and release it And so what I want to do is just open discussion on like what would be the interesting things that I could include a little bit more than just this List of coding criteria and references I do not want to replace zotero. I do not want to replace Mendeley, I just want to create this clean readable interface that allows us to Look at each citation and reference and visualize it quickly at what stage it belonged to in the research synthesis pipeline and And hopefully by creating a highly visual tool that maybe is very intuitive It's easier to achieve our research synthesis goals So again, I'm at the University of South Florida and I really appreciate your time