Features - Tools Menu

This chapter provides an overview of all the features found under the Tools Menu.

The following Features can be found in the Tools Menu:
  • Online Search: Allows the ability to search and retrieve the references from several bibliographical databases (i.e. PubMed, PubMed Central, IEEE, US Patents, and ArXiv.org) directly from within Synthesis. See Online Search
  • Kappa Calculator: Provides the ability to calculate a Kappa Statistic based upon two user-created columns (i.e. custom column). See Kappa Calculator
  • Sample Column: Creates a random sample column with the value 'Yes'. This allows the user to create a column and then randomly assign a specific percentage of the references to the 'Yes' value. See Sample Column
  • Derive Meta Data: Derives custom columns of pre-defined topics from the title or abstract based upon keywords and phrases. Topics include which countries, provinces/states are identified in the title/abstract, primary author country and province derived from afflilation meta data, population types (i.e. infants, elderly, males, females, etc.) are identified in the title/abstract, and study types (i.e. Systematic Review, RCT, Case Control, etc.). Uses automation to identify keywords in the reference and full-text article. See Derive Meta Data
  • Derive Meta Data from Text File: Derives custom columns of user-generated topics from several fields (i.e. title, abstract, fulltext, affliation) based upon keywords and phrases. Uses automation to identify keywords in the reference and full-text article.See Derive Meta Data from Text File
  • Author Statistics: Automatically preforms some data extraction and calculations based upon the Authors column for every reference. Creates custom columns for First Author, Second Author, Last Author and total number of authors in the reference. See Author Statistics
  • Grey Literature: Grey Literature is the ability to manually enter references that may not be available from a bibliographical data source. See Grey Literature
  • Scan for PDFs: Provides the ability for Synthesis to check all other Synthesis projects for associated PDFs related to the references in the current project. Since many user projects may be some what related, the PDFs from one project may be relevant (i.e. included) to another project. Saves time having not to re-download an existing PDF. See Scan for PDFs
  • Extract Images from PDFs: Allows the ability to extract the images (i.e. charts and figures) from PDFs for all of the references. See Extract PDF Images