Screen4Me
What is it?
It’s a service designed to help review teams get through the screening of search results much more quickly without compromising on quality. It’s made up of three components: Known Assessments, the RCT Classifier, and Cochrane Crowd.
Known Assessments are records that have been through Cochrane’s citizens science platform, Cochrane Crowd, and received a final classification of either describing a randomised controlled trial (RCT) or not.
The RCT Classifier is a machine learning routine that assigns records a likelihood score based on whether the machine thinks the record is describing an RCT or not.
Cochrane Crowd (http://crowd.cochrane.org) is Cochrane’s crowdsourcing platform where contributors from around the world help to identify randomised trials and other types of healthcare-related research.
How does it work?
Once the review team has conducted the searches, the de-duplicated search results are loaded into the Cochrane Register of Studies. Once imported, the Screen4Me workflow can be applied. The first part of the workflow will identify any already known RCTs; the second stage will remove very obvious non-RCT records from the set via machine learning; the final stage sends the remaining records to be assessed by a crowd via Cochrane Crowd. At the end of the process, the author team are hopefully left with a much-reduced batch of records to assess.
Screen4Me projects take on average two weeks to complete.
The expected reduction in the size of the search results set is between 50-70%
Who can use it?
It is currently only available for Cochrane intervention reviews that are looking to include evidence from randomised controlled trials only.
How do I access it?
There are two main ways to access Screen4Me:
- Contact the Cochrane information specialist you are working with. Many Cochrane information specialists have been trained to run the Screen4Me service. They will do this using the Cochrane Register of Studies application.
- If you are not working with a Cochrane information specialist or they do not have access to Screen4Me, contact Cochrane Support. They will be able to arrange the Screen4Me service for you.