Paperfetcher: A Tool to Automate Hand-Searching and Citation-Searching for Systematic Reviews

• In Event: Innovative Methods and Tools for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

Abstract

Traditional handsearching requires reviewers to manually browse through a curated list of field-specific journals and conference proceedings to find relevant articles. This manual process is not only time-consuming, laborious, costly, and error-prone due to human fatigue, but it also lacks replicability due to its cumbersome manual nature. This paper presents a free and open-source Python package and an accompanying web-app, Paperfetcher, to automate the retrieval of article metadata for handsearching. Paperfetcher allows researchers to download the metadata of retrieved studies as a list of DOIs or as an RIS file to facilitate seamless import into systematic review screening software. To the best of our knowledge, Paperfetcher is the first tool to automate handsearching with high usability and a multi-disciplinary focus.

Authors

• Qiyang Zhang, Johns Hopkins University
  Presenting Author

• Akash Pallath, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author