Set up data preparation procedures to ensure high-quality and machine-readable data (Collect)
Prepare bibliographic metadata and full-text data so they are complete, consistent, machine-readable, and reliably linked for downstream steps (dedupe, screening, extraction, synthesis).
Why this matters
- Higher-quality evidence base: Clean metadata improves deduplication, retrieval, and screening accuracy.
- Automation readiness: Machine-readable full texts (searchable PDFs/OCR) enable computational extraction or annotation, and prevent errors in the analyses.
Practical implementation
- Enrich and validate metadata via authoritative APIs (e.g., Crossref) to fill missing fields (DOI, venue, year, authors) and normalize identifiers.
- Ensure consistent identifiers (DOI/URL) and standardized fields across records to support merging and reproducible filtering.
- Make full texts machine-readable (prefer searchable PDFs; apply OCR when needed) and store them with stable file names/paths.
- Maintain links between
records(metadata) andpdfdocuments (full text), so each record resolves to exactly the corresponding document(s) and vice versa.
Resources