APS: An Active PubMed Search System for Technology Assisted Reviews

Abstract

Systematic reviews constitute the cornerstone of Evidence-based Medicine. They can provide guidance to medical policy-making by synthesizing all available studies regarding a certain topic. However, conducting systematic reviews has become a laborious and time-consuming task due to the large amount and rapid growth of published literature. The TAR approaches aim to accelerate the screening stage of systematic reviews by combining machine learning algorithms and human relevance feedback. In this work, we built an online active search system for systematic reviews, named APS, by applying an state-of-the-art TAR approach -- Continuous Active Learning. The system is built on the top of the PubMed collection, which is a widely used database of biomedical literature. It allows users to conduct the abstract screening for systematic reviews. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the APS in detecting relevant literature and reducing workload for systematic reviews using the CLEF TAR 2017 benchmark.