Menu Bar

The Menu bar consists of the following top-item menu categories: Project (Change Project, Project Settings, Preferences, Import/Export Project) , Paper (Include/Exclude), Tools (Online Search, Kappa Calculator, Sample Column, Derive Meta Data, Author Statistcis, Grey Literature, Scan for PDFs, Extract PDF Images), and Help (User Manual, Update, Licensing, About).

The following functionality can be found in the Project Menu:
  • Change Project: Changes the project that is being worked on within Synthesis. See [TO DO]
  • Project Export: Provides the ability to export the current project. Exporting includes all the data that is contained within Synthesis as well as all of the associated PDFs (note: because of the PDFs the file may become very large). The exported file has the extension .ksp (i.e. Knowledge Share Project). See [TO DO]
  • Project Import: Provides the ability to import a project into the current project. Importing may cause information to be overwritten in the current project so it should be used with caution. See [TO DO]
  • Project Settings: Includes setting the Project's Title, Project Description, keywords to be highlighted in the Title/Abstract and Full-Text PDF document, Exclusion reasons, Managing Custom Columns for data collection, setting Primary and Secondary Researcher view, enabling PDF viewer in main application, displaying PubMed Meta Data, and enabling Duplicates mode. See Project Settings
  • Project Preferences: Includes eZProxy settings (i.e. ability to access an instituation's library resources remotely), assigning the Synthesis projects directory (e.g. assigning a DropBox.com or Box.com folder for all Synthesis projects), Inet Proxy Server Settings (i.e. ability to bypass an organizations firewall), Google Scholar accessibility (i.e. ability to use Google Scholar in the search for full-text PDFs). See Preferences
  • Quit: The "Quit" menu option quits the Synthesis application. Since Synthesis is constantly saving the data, no confirmation window is provided.

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

The Paper Menu provides functionality for setting the inclusion/exclusion status of the current references. Additionally, hotkeys are provided. Include is Ctrl-I (i.e. "In"), Exclude is Ctrl-O (i.e. "Out"), and Unknown is Ctrl-U.
  • Include (Ctrl-I): Include the current reference (i.e. "In").
  • Exclude (Ctrl-O): Excldue the current reference (i.e. "Out").
  • Unknown (Ctrl-U): Mark the current reference as Unknown.

The Help Menu provides information, support material and license registration for Synthesis. The following contents can be found in the Help Menu:
  • Help: Provides a user manual for Synthesis. The user manual is context aware within Synthesis, which means that any window with a question mark icon will link to the relevant help content within the user manual. See Help
  • Register: Provides the ability to register (i.e. license) the Synthesis software. See Register Synthesis
  • Check for Update: Checks the Synthesis server to determine whether the Synthesis version currently running is the latest version. See Check For Update
  • About: Provides information about the Synthesis version number (e.g. release build). See About Synthesis