Software

We develop software packages, primarily for literature reviews. Our software is available in the CoLRev Environment and the fs-ise organization.

CoLRev

CoLRev Logo Total commits
Contributors
DOI

CoLRev (Collaborative Literature Reviews) is an open-source environment for collaborative literature reviews. It integrates with different synthesis tools, takes care of the data, and facilitates Git-based collaboration. To accomplish these goals, CoLRev advances the design of review technology at the intersection of methods, design, cognition, and community building. The following features stand out:

  • Supports all literature review steps: problem formulation, search, dedupe, (pre)screen, pdf retrieval and preparation, and synthesis
  • An open and extensible environment based on shared data and process standards
  • Builds on git and its transparent collaboration model for the entire literature review process
  • Offers a self-explanatory, fault-tolerant, and configurable user workflow
  • Operates a model for data quality, content curation, and reuse
  • Enables typological and methodological pluralism throughout the process

SearchQuery

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Contributors
DOI

SearchQuery is a Python package for parsing, validating, simplifying, and serializing search queries for academic databases. It currently supports PubMed, EBSCOHost, and Web of Science, using a standardized JSON schema (Haddaway et al., 2022).

  • Programmatic use, CLI interface, and optional integration via pre-commit hooks
  • Zero dependencies: easily embeddable across environments
  • Extensible parser/validator architecture
  • Tested on real-world queries from searchRxiv

BibDedupe

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DOI

BibDedupe is an open-source Python library for deduplication of bibliographic records, tailored for literature reviews. Unlike traditional deduplication methods, BibDedupe focuses on entity resolution, linking duplicate records instead of simply deleting them.

  • Automated Duplicate Linking with Zero False Positives: BibDedupe automates the duplicate linking process with a focus on eliminating false positives.
  • Preprocessing Approach: BibDedupe uses a preprocessing approach that reflects the unique error generation process in academic databases, such as author re-formatting, journal abbreviation or translations.
  • Entity Resolution: BibDedupe does not simply delete duplicates, but it links duplicates to resolve the entity and integrates the data. This allows for validation, and undo operations.
  • Programmatic Access: BibDedupe is designed for seamless integration into existing research workflows, providing programmatic access for easy incorporation into scripts and applications.
  • Transparent and Reproducible Rules: BibDedupe’s blocking and matching rules are transparent and easily reproducible to promote reproducibility in deduplication processes.
  • Continuous Benchmarking: Continuous integration tests running on GitHub Actions ensure ongoing benchmarking, maintaining the library’s reliability and performance across datasets.
  • Efficient and Parallel Computation: BibDedupe implements computations efficiently and in parallel, using appropriate data structures and functions for optimal performance.

Deep-CENIC

Deep-CENIC Model Total commits
Contributors
Peer-reviewed | Decision Support Systems

Deep-CENIC is a deep learning classifier that measures the ideational impact of Information Systems review articles.

Highlights

  • Combines citation context, sentiment, position, and semantic similarity as predictive features
  • Offers a gold-standard coded dataset for evaluating ML and DL models
  • Reproducible pipeline using Docker and a Cookiecutter-like data structure
  • Demonstrated in Decision Support Systems (scientometric and NLP evaluation)
  • Includes transparent feature engineering for citation-based impact research

ENLIT

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Peer-reviewed | ECIS2020

ENLIT supports scholars in exploring new literature by making backward searches more efficient and by guiding how to read a literature corpus.

What ENLIT does

  • Extracts references from a literature corpus (set of PDFs) and compiles a deduplicated reference list
  • Provides statistics on journals and authors that are frequently cited in the corpus
  • Implements a novel exploratory reading strategy: first read the most influential papers, then skim the remaining ones
  • Builds on GROBID for robust extraction of bibliographic information

References

Prester, J., Wagner, G., Schryen, G., & Hassan, N. R. (2021). Classifying the ideational impact of information systems review articles: A content-enriched deep learning approach. Decision Support Systems, 140, 113432. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.DSS.2020.113432
Wagner, G. (2024). BibDedupe: An open-source python library for bibliographic record deduplication. Journal of Open Source Software, 9(97), 6318. https://doi.org/10.21105/JOSS.06318
Wagner, G., Empl, P., & Schryen, G. (2020). Designing a novel strategy for exploring literature corpora. European Conference on Information Systems, 1–17. https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2020_rp/44
Wagner, G., & Prester, J. (2025). CoLRev: An open-source environment for collaborative reviews (Version 0.14.0) [Computer software]. https://github.com/CoLRev-Environment/colrev