Edit 2022/WikiLetters Systematic Review (v.1.0.2): 2024/Main Page

This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2022.

"Systematic Reviews" (SR) are literature reviews conducted through reproducible steps and expected to provide reproducible results. We are currently advancing both methods and tools to support improvements concerning reproducible results, which in this case relates to obtaining identical or very similar clusters of selected articles to use in the review. Operating WikiLetters Systematic Review (WLSR) currently requires feeding the system with around (N) academic publications identified as potential candidates for inclusion in the review. But what is N? N is about 10 times the total number of publications (T) you estimate to source through your review, which can be easily and roughly estimated via assessing other reviews on similar topics. That means if you aim to provide about 100 papers in your review then you plan to feed the system with about 1000 papers, which is currently a limitation in the process to be further improved. The proposed presentation is meant to provide an overview of the current updated WLSR process, discuss about strengths and weaknesses of both methods and computing capacity. It will also discuss alternatives to reduce massive downloading of files by using current information available via projects such as The General Index or Open Alex. While we acknowledge the existence of other tools to help SR, WLSR benefits include the following: it's free, it's open, it's transparent, it is highly reproducible and gives the authors power to provide meaningful evidence to attach to their publication. Consequently, traditional statements commonly found in Systematic Reviews, such as "The initial results were 2345, which after doing this (…) were reduced to 543, and after doing that (...) were further reduced to 69" can be replaced with information that can lead to reproducible methods yielding to reproducible results. WLSR promotes activism and consumer rights protection of the existing projects WikiCite, Wikidata, Scholia, CiTO, WikiJournal, and it promotes the Wikipedia ecosystem as an environment for serious academic research. We suggest Wiki-editors who focus on Wikipedia scientific publishing use the WLSR to attach recent research to existing systematic reviews and turn that into a Living Review for use on Wikipedia or beyond.