Introducing CiteSource: A new R package to explore source-level contributions to the stages of a systematic review

Background: Determining the contribution of different databases to a systematic  review search is challenging and tedious with currently available tools  like Endnote. Yet, understanding the value that a source brings to a  review in terms of unique and relevant records can greatly improve and  optimize an overall search strategy and guide decisions about sources to  search in the review updating process.  
Objectives: We aimed to build a new R package that maintains source or other  user-defined metadata during the deduplication process, opening up many  possibilities for the analysis of source contribution, including  contributions at different screening and inclusion stages of the review  process.   
Methods: The R package, called CiteSource, was developed collaboratively by a  team of interdisciplinary researchers, developers, and information  specialists and emerged from a hackathon at the Evidence Synthesis and  Meta-Analysis in R Conference. The package builds on existing evidence  synthesis R packages like ASySD. Unlike standard deduplication processes  in most tools, which merge records into a single record while losing  original metadata and source information, CiteSource was designed to  maintain user-defined metadata at the imported file level, such as  source, database, search string, or review stage. Various plots and  tables were tested to determine the best visualizations to describe  overlap between sources and various other use cases were considered for  the tool.  
Results: CiteSource is now available along with an accompanying Shiny app. It  includes three customizable plots to visualize overlap, as well as a  search summary table with sensitivity and precision values and a  record-level table that indicates the databases in which individual  records were found. It also includes various export formats that can  facilitate further analysis and comparison.   
Conclusions: CiteSource can be used for source contribution comparisons and to  generate search summary tables. However, there may be many other  unexplored use cases for this new tool. For example, CiteSource can be  used pre-screening to evaluate the usefulness of databases to a search  and their contribution to a set of benchmark studies, or to examine  differences in search methods.

Presented at the 2023 Cochrane Colloquium, London, UK