A Global review of cumulative effects assessments of disturbances on forest ecosystems

An automated method for developing search strategies for systematic review using Natural Language Processing (NLP)

“…By its design and implementation, Ananse allows researchers to modify their requirements without creating new software. Even though Ananse has been used for a cumulative effect use case [30] , it is general-purpose software for a systematic review of any kind. It can be applied broadly in ecology and evolutionary biology as well as other fields.…”

“…The final list of search terms (listed as search strings) was grouped under three concepts, as shown in Table 2 . These concepts (and terminology) are cumulative effects, forests and forest ecosystems, and types and forms related to forest disturbance [30] .…”

“…In this research, we mediate the problems associated with search strategy development in systematic literature reviews by developing a method that uses NLP and keyword co-occurrence networks to identify potential keywords to support SR. We adapted the search terms strategy for naïve search proposed by [22] written in R. To facilitate reproducibility and transparency; we created the python package dubbed ‘Ananse’ (a Ghanaian vernacular translated as a spider) to aid the implementation of the method in a user-friendly format. The software and documentation are publicly available via Github [27] and PyPI [28] , [29] , [30] , respectively. We tested our approach by applying it to selecting keywords for a systematic literature review of cumulative effect assessment of disturbance on forest ecosystems (see [30] ).…”

“…The software and documentation are publicly available via Github [27] and PyPI [28] , [29] , [30] , respectively. We tested our approach by applying it to selecting keywords for a systematic literature review of cumulative effect assessment of disturbance on forest ecosystems (see [30] ).…”

“…Using Ananse to perform a search tailored to a SR of cumulative effect studies is described in section 3 . In section 4 , we discuss the outcomes of using Ananse to perform cumulative effect search terms [30] and compare our results with other related works. Finally, in section 5 , we draw conclusions based on our findings and forecast future work.…”