Importing tags and extracted data from a study already completed in another nest#478

My phrasing of this may be unclear, but I’m working on a MT repository right now, and I came across a stroke paper that I’ve seen before in the software. We’ve tagged and extracted it already for a different project. Would there be any way, in the future, you could import these tags and DE’s if that work has already been done in another nest?

Definitely interesting! The primary way to do this would be to start from a Nest Copy, if possible.

The concern I would have about porting tags & DE’s between nests (in a way other than using Nest Copy) would be a potential loss of context. I’d guess that, for your new review, the hierarchy looks very similar & the comparison groups and data elements are similar. However, if they don’t EXACTLY match both the definitions of all tags/interventions/data elements, or if anything differs about the structure of the review, the copied-over content would definitely be incomplete and could be incorrect.

If you have any suggestions, I’m game– I’ve been considering how we can make a way for a research group to reuse studies without starting from scratch, and that’s what landed me on “Copying nests directly is probably the best way”, but I’d love to hear other/creative ideas!

Oh this makes a lot of sense. I didn’t think that the hierarchy would most likely have at least a few differences when importing… I wonder if there would be a chance to highlight (in red or something bright) the tags and DE’s that are different once a user imports the study into the new nest? Almost forcing the user to make appropriate changes to match the new hierarchy.

And maybe not letting the user click complete for tagging or extracting once those red highlighted items are changed

That’s a good start– we may not be able to do the red-highlighting (when we import, the new nest may not be able to have ‘tags that are not in the hierarchy’ on the studies at all). In that case, we may simply need to delete all tags that don’t EXACTLY match the new study’s hierarchy. This could result in lost data, especially if there was a slight name change… I don’t know if this would lead to quality issues, but we’d probably have to do it that way at least to start…

I think deleting the tags that don’t exactly match would be a great start, importing even a few tags would be a head start, and then the study could just be closely QC’ed, and new tags could be added, then DE extracted, etc.