Evidence Synthesis Hackathon announced, Stockholm April 23rd-25th

NEWS | 2018-02-09

Join us for a hackathon to develop tools for rapidly synthesising research evidence, proudly funded by EviEM and the Australian National University. The inaugural Evidence Synthesis Hackathon (ESH) will be held from Monday 23rd – Wednesday 25th April 2018 at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden.

The EviEM Secretariat and EviEM Review Teams have spent the last 6 years honing their skills in evidence synthesis and have gained a huge amount of experience with systematic review and systematic map methodology. We know that even with the best resources available, evidence synthesis requires considerable time and resources to undertake properly.

There are many tasks during a systematic review or map that require intensive human labour, like screening of tens of thousands of search results, or downloading hundreds or thousands of article texts. Because of the vital need for transparency when reporting review methods, it is also a challenge to juggle so many search results, articles and datasets in a way that easily allows us to report clearly what we did and how.

Many people believe that technology is the key to making these processes more efficient and transparent. Indeed, here at EviEM, we rely on review management software to help us record our activities and track the fate of each article in our reviews.

Now, EviEM Project Manager Neal Haddaway has teamed up with Martin Westgate from the Australian National University to run a ‘hackathon’ with the aim of developing new tools to make the process of reviewing even more efficient and transparent. They believe that we can make systematic reviews and maps more efficient, and produce better results, by improving the ecosystem of available open science tools for effective synthesis. To make this happen, they are inviting interested researchers, practitioners and coders to Stockholm to help discuss and develop new open-source software for evidence synthesis applications.

– This will be the perfect place to learn about evidence synthesis, meet fellow coders, and help shape research in this important field, says Neal and Martin. The hackathon will build upon great work already started by coders and developers to identify outstanding problems in evidence synthesis, and to offer software solutions that can easily be further developed and used by everyone.

If you are a coder, programmer or developer, and you are interested in learning more about evidence synthesis (or if you’re already an expert in both!), please fill in the Expression of Interest below. There is full funding for travel and accommodation for around 10-15 people to visit Stockholm in April. See the hackathon website for more details.