The question
Before a systematic review can synthesise evidence, duplicate records need to be identified. Errors at that stage can alter the evidence base. This study examines the process in a specialist paediatric neuroradiology corpus.
The approach
The study compares deduplication tools, focusing on reproducibility and validity: whether repeated use produces consistent outcomes and whether those outcomes correctly identify duplicate records.
What we know
The study was published in Pediatric Radiology. The corpus is available in the supplementary materials of the same paper.
What remains open
Performance on one specialist corpus may not generalise to other disciplines or bibliographic sources. Tool versions, settings, reference labels and error definitions affect how comparisons should be interpreted.
- How were duplicates defined and labelled?
- Are results reproducible across repeated runs?
- Which failures might affect a review’s conclusions?
Paper abstract
Deduplication tools in paediatric neuroradiology
Background
Deduplication is usually treated as a routine preprocessing step in systematic reviews, yet errors introduced at this stage are not visible in Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flow diagrams and can propagate through evidence synthesis.
Objective
To evaluate the validity and reproducibility of commonly used deduplication tools in a paediatric neuroradiology systematic review.
Excerpt: background and objective. Read the full abstract and methods in the published paper.