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Screening or assessing studies is critical to the quality and outcomes of a systematic review. Typically, a Boolean query retrieves the set of studies to screen. As the set of studies retrieved is unordered, screening all retrieved studies is usually required for high-quality systematic reviews.

Fine-grained logging of interactions in user studies is important for studying user behaviour, among other reasons. However, in many research scenarios, the way interactions are logged are usually tied to a monolithic system.

Often, existing chat services that organisations and individuals use today provide a way to search through previously sent messages. However, many of these chat services provide far-limited search functionalities, typically exact matching on individual messages.

Coordination level matching is a ranking method originally proposed to rank documents given Boolean queries that is now several decades old. Rank fusion is a relatively recent method for combining runs from multiple systems into a single ranking, and has been shown to significantly improve the ranking.

Searching literature for a systematic review begins with a manually constructed search strategy by an expert information specialist. The typical process of constructing search strategies is often undocumented, ad-hoc, and subject to individual expertise, which may introduce bias in the systematic review.

Formulating Boolean queries for systematic review literature search is a challenging task. Commonly, queries are formulated by information specialists using the protocol specified in the review and interactions with the research team.

Searching medical literature for synthesis in a systematic review is a complex and labour intensive task. In this context, expert searchers construct lengthy Boolean queries. The universe of possible query variations can be massive: a single query can be composed of hundreds of field-restricted search terms/phrases or ontological concepts, each grouped by a logical operator nested to depths of sometimes five or more levels deep.

Background: Within the last decade the rise of digital publishing has become widespread, enabling publications to be edited and updated after-the-fact. In the medical domain, systematic reviews are one type of digital document that is often updated after initial publication.

In the medical domain, systematic reviews are a highly trustworthy evidence source used to inform clinical diagnosis and treatment, and governmental policy making. Systematic reviews must be complete in that all relevant literature for the research question of the review must be synthesised in order to produce a recommendation.

Background: Searching for studies to include in systematic reviews involves the construction of complex search strategies. The effectiveness of these search strategies directly impacts the workload associated with conducting a systematic review.