The EPPI-Reviewer systems implement a number of ways to interact with the OpenAlex dataset. Similar to Google Scholar, OpenAlex aims to be a comprehensive repository of the World’s research and currently contains more than 260 million records. OpenAlex launched in January 2022 to replace Microsoft Academic, which was withdrawn from service at the end of 2021.
The availability of a comprehensive, regularly updated, repository of research is extremely useful for systematic reviewers in three ways.
First, given its comprehensive nature, it probably contains all, or nearly all, the studies that are likely to be relevant for evidence synthesis projects, thus reducing the number of sources that reviewers need to search. Boolean searches can be carried out to identify studies that might be relevant in new reviews (more on this below).
Second, when some relevant studies have already been located, connections in the sophysticated graph of publications maintained in OpenAlex can be used to locate other studies that are ‘close’ to the studies already known to be of interest. This feature can be used to bring a review up to date, to complement/integrate Boolean searches, and also for citation chasing – where reviewers check bibliographies of known records for other eligible studies.
Finally, as the dataset is updated regularly, it can be used as a way of keeping existing systematic reviews up to date, supporting ‘living’ review workflows (often in conjuction with Boolean and/or "related" searches). The challenge facing these use scenarios – and not an inconsiderable one! – is how to distinguish the records of interest from the vast majority of other (irrelevant) records. EPPI Reviewer includes a set of tools within that use machine learning to find new records that are similar to the ones already included in reviews that subscribe to this service. This system will automatically generate "new references" pre-classified/evaluated results, each time OpenAlex publishes a "snapshot of changes", which happens roughly once per month. Users can further refine these results by applying their own, or pre-built classifiers, and import new references accordingly.

Additionally, OpenAlex now supports complex Boolean searches, although with a syntax that may feel unfamiliar even to seasoned systematic reviewers. EPPI Reviewer allows to leverage these capabilities in full, and for this reason our own information specialists (Hossein Dehdarirad and Claire Stansfield) have written a guide on Boolean searches (within and without EPPI Reviewer). It is available here.

Below you can find an overview of the OpenAlex in EPPI-Reviewer features.

Getting started

In order to begin to use these features in EPPI-Reviewer, click the 'update review' button on the home page. If you don't have this button and would like to try out these features, please contact support to enable them for you on a specific review.

You can download a pdf version of this guidance here (this guide was written targetting the Microsoft Academic Graph database, now many/most features described here now work against OpenAlex, and of course, more features/details have been added since).