Option to sort quantitative synthesis dropdown by tag hierarchy#526

We had a repository nest with a lot of different data elements, and having the quantitative synthesis drop down sorted by number of studies tagged makes it very difficult to find specific data elements or easily see similar data elements. The end users are mainly accessing the data through Synthesis to be able to see what’s available and get a quick impression of the results. Seeing what proportion of studies report each data element is definitely useful, but not as much as being able to quickly find an outcome of interest. Suggest grouping the data elements by where they’re placed in the hierarchy, or alphabetically, which would at least make it easier to find them in a long list and keep similar measures together.

Thanks Erin! To be clear, you’re talking about the Study Modal with the list of tags for that specific study?

If that’s what you mean, I TOTALLY agree and want this to be organized to match the hierarchy. Let me know if I’m mischaracterizing!

I think we’re talking about the same thing, this is a screenshot of the list I’m thinking about (currently very hard to see exactly what final TICI measures are available and glance through the results for them, for example!)

Oh, we actually aren’t– glad I asked! This is the “Data Element drop-down”, I was thinking of this modal for individual study examination shown in this image (and was confused about some of what you noted– the picture makes it totally clear).

I’ll take this request in, but note that the data elements themselves are currently organized by data density / how commonly they are reported. So, we may want to make an additional “Search” or “Sort” function rather than getting rid of that function, unless we think data density is not of import to users.

If you have a preferred method (that would keep data density as an option) or if you don’t care about data density, I’d love to hear it. thanks again!

I do like having the data density information presented in the list with the bar visual, but the most dense element is often not what I want to look at first- usually the most dense elements are common patient characteristics, where the numbers alone without correlation to an outcome don’t really provide any new info, rather than outcome measures/rates. For example, in studies where we collect them, age and sex are almost always the most dense, since nearly everyone reports them, but it’s not usually our main interest to look at age and sex groupings for different interventions.

Got it– so, you’d like to keep that display of data density as-is, EXCEPT order by the hierarchy (or alphabetically).

I’ll talk to the team and let you know if we can adjust this– I definitely understand that there is not a 1-to-1 correlation between dense data and data of interest!

Thanks Kevin!