Filter by bibliographic data (especially publication date) in synthesis#471
Our client had an interesting idea in a meeting today, it would be helpful in some cases to be able to filter by publication date and possibly other basic bibliographic data in Qualtitative Synthesis, especially when the nest is being used as a living systematic review or repository. We’re planning to add tags for ranges of years to allow them to assess how many available studies are more recent vs older, but it would be cool to have some way to access that info without adding another set of tags.
Thanks Erin! I’ve gotten this request myself and think it’s reasonable. You’re correct, the workaround (for now) is to tag for these things, but I agree that it would be helpful to have that.
Do you have any preference on how those filters are presented? Where in QLS would bibliographic filters ‘live’?
I think it could work well as a tab in the panel on the right. It came up for us when we were looking at the filter in the PRISMA chart, but I think having it up at the top all the time would be in the way, and obviously it would be preferrable to be able to choose things like filtering before or after a given date, instead of just earlier like the PRISMA chart feature.
I largely like this request, and think it generalizes fairly well (e.g. users may want to filter on risk of bias assessment). We certainly wouldn’t expose all inspector filters (e.g. workflow related ones), but the interface could look & work similarly.
Adding a request to filter/sort by author in the Synthesis filtering interface, thanks for adding the feature!
Doh! We lost track of this issue, which was (largely) addressed by release 1.77.0. We’d be happy to add additional filters, e.g. on Author.
- Any other filters you would like?
- Could you expand on where the sort would be reflected? For a variety of reasons, implementing a universal sort on Synthesis would be challenging.
Thanks Karl! For sort, the filter view has the same “sort” arrows as study inspector, but nothing happens when they’re clicked. Filter is definitely more useful, so if it’s a problem to implement sort I wouldn’t mind just having filter. I do think that having the studies ordered by nkid is hard for humans to process, especially for people who are only seeing the synthesis results and not involved in the work in the nest- alphabetizing by title or author would be preferrable. We’ve also had a client interested in filtering by journal, that’s a more niche application though, author and year are definitely the main filters in my mind. Thank you!
Oh thanks- yes I see the confusion around sort! I can look into reordering QLS study listing by author, which I agree is more intuitive- would just need to make sure it doesn’t clash with our specifications.
And sure, happy to add author + journal filtering!
Awesome, thanks!
Added in release 1.78.0 :)