RevMan (v5.3), the open-access text editor for authors of reviews, produces structured XML (Extensible Markup Language) files (.rm5) within which there are structured references to reports of studies (often a many-to-one relationship), one semi-structured table per study containing details of the methods, participants, interventions and outcomes of that study (Fig. For creating the RAPTOR tool, the integrated development environment ‘Eclipse’ was used (Oxygen.3a version). One interested undergraduate student (LS) of Applied Health Sciences, with past experience of RevMan files (4 months full time), access to 224 pre-publication RevMan files and the help of printed popular texts, numerous YouTube tutorials and internet fora. To describe an open-access software programme that facilitates supplying, structuring and curation of these data. Recent encouragement for the Cochrane organisation to honour their own commitments to wide access to the basic dataset is welcome, but the practical difficulty remains of how to easily acquire data in an accessible form. Cochrane can supply full datasets on request but access to these has been limited. Wider access to the semi-structured data affords opportunity for auto-curation-automatic tidying of the data-to either return to the source file in a clearer form, or for import into other reviews or programmes for reuse or novel analyses.

Full replication of the review analyses is impossible and the use for novel purposes very limited. Exports are partial and limited to a format specific to RevMan. These valuable data, however, are ‘held’ within a single review.įurther and extraneous use of these semi-structured study data is not easy as exporting them from reviews once published is problematic. RevMan data entry is laborious but Cochrane methods endeavour to maximise the reliability of the resulting semi-structured data. RevMan undertakes analyses whilst marking up all text for full publication on the online Cochrane Library. It is created by the efforts of thousands of people, still mostly volunteers, carefully extracting data from studies (largely randomised trials), entering these qualitative and quantitative data into an open-access software package (RevMan ). The Cochrane Library contains the largest repository of maintained systematic reviews.

Revman software download